Indonesia bans Tumblr over pornography

Indonesian Ministry of Communications announced it will block access to microblogging platform Tumblr for hosting pornographic content, media reported Thursday.

“After an exhaustive study by the panel of pornography, the Ministry has decided to ban Tumblr since it contains many videos and pornographic images,” said the Ministry’s ebusiness director, Azhar Hasyim to website Detik.

The Ministry has also decided to ban 477 other online sites for the same reasons, and has requested internet service providers in a letter to block access to these sites.

According to Azhar, blocking access to these pages will take two to three days.

Tumblr, which has about 280 million blogs, was set up in 2007 by David Karp and acquired by Yahoo! in 2013 for $1.1 billion.

The ban was announced a week after the Indonesian government demanded the removal of emoticons representing homosexuality in messaging apps, following an internet campaign against Line, another popular messaging application, for the same reason.