Gifs have grown to become an important part of communicating on the Internet, but Indonesia’s Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (Kemkominfo) has now blocked access to giphy.com, one of the web’s biggest repositories of the little animated image files.
Joining a long list of websites that have been blocked by the ministry on questionable grounds such as Reddit, Vimeo and Funny or Die, going to Giphy.com in Indonesia should now will bring you to the government’s “Internet Positif” page or that of your ISP.
The Head of Information and Public Relations at Kemkominfo, Noor Iza, told the media that the site had been reported to them by a member of the public through their website and that the ministry had chosen to block it on the grounds that the site ran online gambling ads.
“If we click the ads, we will be direct to the gambling site,” Noor Iza said as quoted by Kumparan.
Some might argue that’s an odd reason to block a website. Why not just block the gambling site? By this logic, can the ministry just block any website on the grounds that it links to forbidden sites?
Either way, there are tons of other gif search websites and access to giphy.com’s content doesn’t seem to be blocked through other sites (for example you can still do a Giphy search within Facebook Messenger). So don’t break out those end of the world gifs quite yet.
