Indonesia and Google agreed to improve content monitoring on YouTube in order to counteract the negative material circulating in cyberspace.
The agreement was built by the Indonesian government with Google parent Alphabet Inc., due to concerns over the growing misuse of social media platforms to disseminate material related to terrorism, racial violence, and pornography.
"Indonesia has begun testing trusted flagger system to filter content on the video sharing website and will try to formalize it in the coming months," explained Rudiantara, Minister of Communications and Informatics, to media crews in Jakarta, as quoted by Bloomberg (Friday, 4/8/2017).
The flagging system that will be used by local ministries and non-governmental groups will be limited to YouTube and will not apply to Google search engines.
According to Rudiantara, while the marking system has been implemented in many countries, including the United States (US) and also in Europe, Indonesia will be the first country in Southeast Asia to implement it.
Indonesia, also known to have the world's most populous Muslim population, has been concerned about the use of social media and other Internet-based platforms to disseminate material related to terrorism and racial, pornographic, and child molestation.
"We want to make sure the content does not promote violence or trigger a split in the country," he continued after meeting with Google executives.
Meanwhile, Taj Meadows, Google's chief policy communications for Asia Pacific, declined to comment.
In a separate meeting that also took place today, a number of Indonesian government officials and executives from Twitter Inc. Agreed on the need to improve the monitoring of the content even though the method of handling has not yet been decided upon.
Samuel Abrijani, general director for information applications at the Ministry of Communications, said that the government has proposed a similar system for Twitter as agreed with Google.