One of the #KembalikanMediaIslam memes floating around Twitter right now
Yesterday, the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology (Menkominfo) announced that it was blocking 19 Islamic media sites after receiving a request from the National Counterterrorism Agency (BNPT), which decided the sites were promoting radicalism.
This latest round of Internet censorship has already received a lot of criticism online. Now the editors of several of the websites blocked by Menkominfo are protesting the decision and taking their case to the ministry and the public.
Editors from seven of the blocked sites went to Menkominfo headquarter today to meet with officials to present them with an official letter asking them to reverse their decision.
“With this, we as representatives of the blocked sites, file a protest against the blockage of our sites because our sites do not contain negative content as stipulated by Ministerial Regulation No.19/2014,” said Agus Soelarto, the chief editor of aqlislamiccenter.com, one of the blocked sites, as quoted by the Jakarta Post.
The editors said they had received no warning from the ministry about their sites being blocked or an opportunity to defend their content.
“It’s unfair and looks authoritarian when there’s no conversation and suddenly the sites are just blocked,” said Mahladi, the editor of Hidayatullah.com told Tribunnews.
The editor of salam-online.com, Ubaidillah Salman, told the Jakarta Post that none of the sites that were banned supported radicalism or terrorism.
“We don’t even report about ISIS. What is ISIS? It doesn’t matter to us,” he said, adding that all the sites do is aggregate news from various agencies such as CNN, AFP and Antara.
The editors said they would next go directly to BNPT to ask the counter-terrorism agency why they were blocked.
However BNPT Deputy of Enforcement and Development Arief Dharmawan said his agency was not interested in debating the definition of radicalism.
“We do not want to argue about the problem of radicalism. We just want to say, who is responsible for writing the incendiary things that go on those sorts of websites?” Arief told CNN Indonesia today.
