Indonesia orders X to remove gambling-related ads

Officials from social networking platform X have been called by Indonesia’s Ministry of Communication and Information Technology to discuss tightening laws against the promotion of illegal gambling.

At the request of Indonesia’s Minister of Communications and Informatics, Budie Arie, X’s Singapore office—formerly known as Twitter—confirmed the summons.

Semuel Abrijani Pangerapan, the ministry’s Director General of Informatics Applications, praised the action but expressed concern about the persistence of online gambling advertisements on X in spite of prior warnings.

In order to eliminate the need for human reporting of posts that could violate local laws, the government wants to see X develop and deploy more advanced systems to recognize and automatically handle gambling-related information.

According to Pangerapan, the standard procedure involves notifying people when offensive content is deleted. He said that they have encouraged them to build automated systems, but if they keep removing information, it becomes burdensome. In this way, the item will be deleted right away if similar material surfaces, saving them the trouble of constantly requesting removal.

Indonesia has been recognized as a desirable market by online gambling businesses seeking to capitalize on its youthful and expanding populace. The goal of the next discussions between X and the Indonesian government is to strengthen the regulation of illegal online gambling campaigns that target the populace of that nation. More than 500,000 gambling-related websites and advertisements were outlawed by authorities last year.

Original story by: Asia Gaming Brief