After years of manual censorship to combat illegal and explicit content, Indonesia has finally managed to scrape together a multi-million super-AI to take control of the internet to make it “safe”.
The new Indonesian internet machine reportedly cost $14 million to develop, and it uses machine learning and an AI to crawl the internet and identify keywords to flag websites as explicit or inappropriate. Once websites have been identified and blacklisted, the Indonesian Communications Technology Ministry will review websites and block them. In the past, blocking followed a more direct manual monitoring method. This new method lets the ICT perform censorship of illegal content much faster.
“After the conent is crawled, our team will evaluate and verify the data,” Pangerapan, the ministry’s director, told Arab News. “We will then block sites that are validated as carrying negative content. This machine will make our jobs a lot faster.”
The new machine AI will search for websites containing information or topics on gambling, terrorism, fraud, fake news, drugs, porn, and anything else the Indonesian government doesn’t want internet users seeing. The old methods the ICT used only detected around 700,000 sites with offensive content, but since Dec. 29, the new AI has crawled around 1.2 million sites and detected 120,000 websites with content that matches the filters for the blacklists. The ICT wants to block millions of websites with this new methodology and it seems on the right track to do so.
The capabilities of the AI are frightening, which has caused many criticisms on how the technology could be used or abused in various sectors. However, the ICT claims that the machine learning AI is not designed for use for surveillance or monitoring internet conversations. But it’s very easy to see how it could be used for such things which is bad news for the large population of Indonesians that use the internet. For 132.7 million internet connected Indonesians, privacy might have just gone out the window.
Fortunately, TorGuard VPN is more secure than ever in Indonesia with plenty of fast servers to choose from. An Indonesian VPN like TorGuard gives you uncensored access to even websites blocked by the ICT. With our anonymously assigned IP addresses and VPN encryption, you can easily circumvent firewalls, blocks, and invasive spying.
