Indonesia is thinking about banning the popular chat app Telegram because of worries that it doesn’t do a good job of filtering out illegal material. Budi Arie Setiadi, the country’s Minister of Communication and Informatics, said that the platform has not fixed problems related to the spread of illegal material like pornography and online gaming, even though the government has asked them to do so many times.
Indonesia still has over 27 million downloads of Telegram, making it one of the countries with the most users in the world. The live-streaming app Bigo Live is also being looked at by the authorities as a possible target for a ban.
Minister Setiadi said he wanted to shut down both sites, but he stressed that there needed to be full investigations before anything was done. He warned that Indonesia could stop the sites if proof of illegal activities kept coming up. It’s possible that this will have big effects on Telegram, since Indonesia is one of its biggest markets. As things happen, Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram, is being questioned by French authorities over suspected illegal actions connected to the platform.
