Like Reddit and Vimeo, Tumblr is a website that contains a huge wealth of user generated content including a relatively small amount of pornographic material. And like Reddit and Vimeo, Tumblr has now been officially blocked by the Indonesian government because of that pornographic content.
The Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (Menkominfo) today announced that highly popular microblogging site, used by an estimated 420 million people worldwide, would be blocked in Indonesia following the results of a pornography censorship panel discussion.
“After going through the assessment as discussed by the Pornography Panel yesterday, Menkominfo has decided to block Tumblr because it contains a lot of pornographic videos and pictures,” said Azhar Hashim, director of e-business at Menkominfo as quoted by Detik.
Azhar said that in addition to Tumblr, there are 477 other websites that the government has decided to block for pornographic content, though a complete list of those sites has not been made available to the media yet.
Menkominfo said they had already sent out letters to ISPs to process the block, meaning that it will probably take some a few days to enact the Tumblr block.
Whenever bans such as this one occur, people inevitably point out that other popular sites such as Youtube and Twitter can also easily be used to access pornographic material. Yet somehow, they remain safe. Could it be because the government accepts the inconsistency because they know there would be riots on the streets if they tried to take Youtube and Twitter away from Indonesian users? Nah, the government would never be that hypocritical.
