Some thoughts on Indonesia

A lot of Telegram's early adopters come from Indonesia, and now we have several million users in that beautiful country. I am personally a big fan of Indonesia – I’ve been there a few times and have many friends there.

So it made me upset to hear that the Indonesian Ministry of Communication and IT suggested they would have to block Telegram in Indonesia. It turns out that the officials of the Ministry recently emailed us a list of public channels with terrorism-related content on Telegram, and our team was unable to quickly process them.

Unfortunately, I was unaware of these requests, which caused this miscommunication with the Ministry. To fix the current situation, we're implementing the following 3-step solution:

1) We have blocked all the terrorist-related public channels that have been previously reported to us by the Ministry of Communication and IT of Indonesia.
2) I emailed back to the Ministry to establish a direct channel of communication, which should allow us to work more efficiently on identifying and blocking terrorist propaganda in the future.
3) We are forming a dedicated team of moderators with knowledge of Indonesian language and culture to be able to process reports of terrorist-related content more quickly and accurately.

Telegram is heavily encrypted and privacy-oriented, but we’re no friends of terrorists – in fact, every month we block thousands of ISIS-related public channels and publish the result of this work in @isiswatch. We’re constantly striving to be more efficient at preventing terrorist propaganda, and are always open to ideas on how to get better at this.

I emailed the Ministry my suggestions above to hear their feedback. I am confident we can efficiently eradicate terrorist propaganda without disrupting the legitimate use of Telegram by millions of Indonesians. I will keep you updated in this channel on how Telegram will develop in Indonesia – and globally.