President Joko Widodo is currently in the United States and spent most of his time on Wednesday meeting with tech industry leaders in Silicon Valley pushing Indonesia’s potential as a center for technology and e-commerce (all while government officials here seem to be confused over which parts of the internet they want to block off from the country…).
One of his meetings was with Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who Jokowi had already met here in 2014 when they went on a much publicized visit to Tanah Abang market.
This time around, the president spent his time with Zuckerberg doing something slightly different than visiting a textile market, namely playing zero-gravity ping pong in virtual reality.
The president also took a trip to Twitter headquarters and, just to prove how tech-savvy he is, his PR team documented the visit on Periscope live.
Afterwards, Jokowi tweeted this message:
“We encourage @twitter to join in spreading the message of tolerance and peace in the world”
While it’s not yet exactly clear what the president meant by that, could it perhaps have something to do with yesterday’s announcement that Twitter representatives in Indonesia (along with reps from Line and Blackberry) would be implementing censorship filters specifically for Indonesia?
Or could that message of tolerance and peace have something to do with the Indonesian government wanting Twitter and other social media services to get rid of LGBT emoticons?
We also have to wonder if Jokowi had something to do with the government flip flopping on the Tumblr ban so quickly – perhaps he was upset that all of the headlines about his trip to Silicon Valley were getting blocked by the more pressing news of the microblogging site getting banned?
That’s a lot of speculation, we know. But one thing is for certain – we really want to play some zero-gravity VR ping pong right now.
