Indonesia's 'Internet Positif' Block of Reddit

In May 2014, during an online pornography crackdown, the Indonesian government blocked Reddit along with Vimeo and Imgur, citing the presence of nudity and sexual content. The blocking was carried out through 'Trust Positif' (popularly called 'Internet Positif'), the state's official filtering system used to restrict sites deemed to contain 'negative content' such as pornography and gambling. The action was formalised under a 2014 Ministerial Regulation that designated the government's filtering apparatus as the official blocking provider, giving the Communications and Information Ministry, then known as Kominfo, broad authority to restrict access to foreign sites.

The block's history is more tangled than a single uninterrupted ban. According to the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI), the ban on Vimeo and Reddit was lifted in November 2014 following the election of the country's new government. Yet when OONI analysed network measurements collected from 21 local vantage points between 22 June 2016 and 1 March 2017, it confirmed the blocking of 161 websites in Indonesia and found Vimeo and Reddit still blocked in some networks more than two years after the official reversal. Reddit alone presented 76 block pages during the testing, implemented through DNS hijacking.

OONI attributed the persistence to the design of the 2014 decree, under which Indonesian ISPs are granted the authority to ban 'negative content' at their own discretion, regardless of whether a site appears on the ministry's official Trust Positif blocklists. Blocking often proceeded at the initiative of the dominant state provider Telkom, producing uneven blocking of prominent sites such as Vimeo, Netflix, Imgur and Reddit across different networks. The researchers observed that reddit.com "is mostly known as a web forum (rather than as a pornographic site)" and suggested it "may have been blocked for hosting some pornographic content and for enabling heated religious and political debates."

A decade later the block remained a fact of Indonesian internet life. A February 2024 Tempo explainer counted Reddit and Vimeo among the non-pornography, non-gambling sites the government has blocked, noting that Reddit is a community discussion site like the local forum Kaskus, and walked readers through the standard workarounds: proxy servers, a Google Chrome VPN extension, and dedicated VPN applications. The regulatory framework had meanwhile hardened; in November 2020, Ministerial Regulation 5 (MR5) was implemented, introducing a number of major obligations on all private electronic service operators doing business in Indonesia, including registration and rapid content-takedown duties backed by the threat of blocking.