In the recent years, social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, along with messaging apps like WhatsApp, LINE, and etc. have grown to become more inclusive and thoughtful about people from different backgrounds and sexual preferences. For example Facebook allowed users to turn their profile photos into rainbows to show support for same-sex marriage.Emojis have also been updated to become more diverse which shows same-sex couples (and now we have emojis for different races). However it seems that there are still some parts of the world where being gay is frowned upon rather heavily, and over in Indonesia, the country’s government has started to clamp down on emojis that might otherwise depict same-sex couples.
According to Ismail Cawidu, spokesman for the Communication and Information Ministry, “Such contents are not allowed in Indonesia based on our cultural law and the religious norms and the operators must respect that. Those things might be considered normal in some Western countries, while in Indonesia it’s practically impossible.”
Cawidu states that the ministry has apparently gotten in touch with a variety of social media platforms and messaging apps to ask them to remove all related emojis. LINE has already complied with the government and has issued a statement that reads, “LINE regrets the incidents of some stickers which are considered sensitive by many people. We ask for your understanding because at the moment we are working on this issue to remove the stickers.”
Unsurprisingly not everyone is thrilled by this, and gay activist Hartoyo says, “This is just the latest in a series of incidents that have happened recently. The Government has let this ignorance go on for far too long and it has put our nation in danger.”
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