The ridiculous controversy in Indonesia over “pornographic” GIFs accessible through popular messaging service WhatsApp might be winding down after the government blocked access to GIF search site Tenor yesterday, but like many poorly understood and misguided moral panics in Indonesia, plenty of people were quick to jump on the bandwagon of publicly denouncing Whatsapp to loudly proclaim their own piety.
Hundreds of students from the Muhammadiyah 5 Vocational High School (SMK) in Jember, East Java, erased Whatsapp from their phones this week as a form of protest after learning that they could access “pornographic” GIFs through the app.
Before deleting the app, the students gathered in their schoolyard and unfurled a number of posters saying they condemned the existence of pornographic content on Whatsapp and urging it to be removed immediately.
https://www.facebook.com/smkmuliacakrukencong/posts/1872214113108151
“All my friends and I agreed to remove this application because we were afraid of accidentally seeing things we should not see,” said one student, Hani Olivia, as quoted by Detik.
Hani, who is majoring in computer technology and networking, said she only learned about the so-called pornographic GIFs from media reports. After they found out it was true, she said she and her friends agreed to remove the app from their phones.
The principal of the school, Abduroziq, said he supported his students and their deletion protest that he and his teachers also removed the offending program. They all pledged not to use it again as long as it included pornographic content.
We’d say that Whatsapp nor Tenor never actually contained pornography, in that none of the GIFs included images of nudity or explicit sexual acts. But under Indonesia’s strict yet ambiguous pornography law, almost anything that could be considered titillating to somebody could be labeled pornography.
READ: ‘The Porno Passion of Rizieq: The Islamic Defenders Front, Playboy and Poetic Justice’
Nonetheless, the students and teacher may not have to wait long before WhatsApp is labeled “porn-free” by the government.
On Monday, the government threatened to block access to the popular app should the so-called obscene content not be removed, but after the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology (Kemenkominfo) blocked access to Tenor (and Tenor, in turn, said it would censor its search results in Indonesia) Kemkominfo says it no longer has plans to ban Whatsapp and instead will focus on the GIF providers.
But while the controversy over Whatsapp may be almost over, Kemenkominfo has indicated that it’s going to extend its moral crusade to other services and search engines that also contain pornographic material, including Google.
So are all of the teachers and students at SMK Muhammadiyah 5 going to stop using Google until they get the porn-free go-ahead from the government as well?
Perhaps instead of supporting their knee-jerk reactions to blown-up moral controversies, they could empower their student’s through lessons in critical thinking and sex education so that they could be mature enough to use technology wisely, instead of relying on government censors to babysit them?
Yeah… that’s never going to happen.
