KONTAN.CO.ID - JAKARTA. Users of the WhatsApp messaging application in Indonesia will no longer be able to access its GIF feature, kompas.com reports, as the Communications and Information Ministry has blocked Tenor, the feature’s Domain Name System (DNS), on Monday. According to the kompas.com report, the GIF feature is no longer available to users of several mobile operators and Internet Service Providers (ISPs), including Telkomsel, Indosat Ooredoo, XL, FirstMedia and Bolt. Searching for GIFs will result in a blank page on WhatsApp's desktop version, while an error message will appear on smartphones that says: "Check your phone’s internet connection and try again."
The ministry had received many reports since Sunday morning on “pornographic content” that was being circulated in the GIF file format via social media and messaging applications, including WhatsApp. The GIF file format supports both static and animated images. Parents were said to be concerned that the moving images would affect their children negatively. “On Sunday afternoon, I placed a direct call to Facebook, the owner of the app,” Semuel Abrijani Pangerapan the ministry’s director general of informatics, said in a press release. The ministry’s Content Report Team (Tim Aduan Konten) found that lewd GIF images could be found by typing in certain keywords, and that the images were provided by third-party apps Tenor.com and Giphy.com. The ministry requested on Sunday evening that the apps take down the inappropriate content, but only Giphy.com responded.
