Communications and Digital Minister Meutya Hafid showed up unannounced at Meta’s Jakarta office on Wednesday with a full media entourage in tow — cameras rolling, reporters trailing, executives summoned, questions fired, headlines secured.
The official justification was that Meta had complied with just 28.47 percent of the government’s requests to act on online gambling and DFK content — disinformation, defamation, and hate speech — making it one of the lowest-performing platforms operating in Indonesia. That is a legitimate regulatory concern. With Facebook and WhatsApp each reaching around 112 million Indonesian users, the scale of exposure to harmful content is not hypothetical.
During the meeting, the Minister also raised Meta’s content moderation practices more broadly, including the removal of a photo she had posted from a visit to Palestine. Posts supporting Iran or Palestine are routinely flagged or taken down while comparable content directed elsewhere passes without review. These are real problems that deserve real scrutiny.
But serious regulatory scrutiny does not typically arrive with a press pack — or with the Director General of Digital Space Supervision, the State Intelligence Agency, the National Cyber and Encryption Agency, TNI Cyber Command, and Bareskrim Polri all in tow. That is not a regulatory inspection. That is a show of state force conducted in front of television cameras, and the distinction matters.
What happened on Wednesday looked far less like oversight and far more like a carefully staged demonstration of authority, timed to produce the evening news clip that shows the Minister doing something, at the precise moment when public anxiety about children and social media makes that image most politically useful. Look tough. Look decisive. Look morally righteous. The optics write themselves.
The trouble is that optics are not policy, and performative enforcement doesn’t fix anything. The content moderation problems she raised on Wednesday are real but they won’t be resolved by a televised office visit any more than Indonesia’s children will be protected by an access ban the platforms can’t meaningfully enforce and teenagers will circumvent within hours. Both moves share the same logic: do the thing that looks like action, and let the appearance of having acted carry the political weight.
That’s a reasonable strategy if the goal is the news cycle. It’s a poor substitute for the harder work of making platforms structurally accountable, which requires leverage, sustained regulatory pressure, and the willingness to demand compliance rather than just demonstrate displeasure in front of cameras.
AuliaSays 