Government Increases Efforts to Close Online Gambling Sites
Jakarta – The government continues to increase efforts to eradicate online gambling content that is rampant on various digital platforms.
Based on data disclosed by the Director General of Digital Space Supervision of the Ministry of Communication and Digital (Komdigi), Alexander Sabar, social media X is one of the platforms with the highest exposure to online gambling content.
“Platform X is recorded as the most exposed to online gambling content, with a total of 1.4 million contents during the period 2016 to January 21, 2025,” explained Sabar.
In addition to X, the Meta platform is recorded as having 735 thousand contents, followed by file sharing with 168 thousand, TikTok 12 thousand, and Telegram 7,800 contents.
Sabar added that his party continues to communicate with X through its representative office in Singapore.
“Unfortunately, currently X does not have a representative office in Indonesia, so communication is carried out with parties in Singapore. We still hope that X can appoint a representative here,” he said.
The National Cyber and Crypto Agency (BSSN) is also actively involved in detecting and handling the spread of online gambling content, including those that infiltrate government websites.
Deputy for Cyber Security and Crypto Operations of BSSN, Dominggus Pakel, explained several stages carried out by his team to handle this problem.
“Our team monitors domains and subdomains 24 hours a day to detect the presence of online gambling content. In addition, we use docking techniques on Google and patrols on the dark web and deep web to search for related URLs,” said Dominggus.
He revealed that throughout 2024, his party found 78 cases of online gambling URL infiltration on government sites.
“Of the 78 cases, 68 cases were hidden URL insertions, while 10 others were the addition of online gambling pages,” he explained.
Dominggus also reported that to date, there are 3,908 government domain URLs affected by online gambling content. A total of 412 URLs are still in the process of being deactivated.
Meanwhile, Sabar explained that from 2017 to January 2025, Komdigi has handled more than 5.7 million online gambling content.
In the last nine months of 2024, the value of online gambling transactions reached IDR 41.2 trillion, although the number continues to decline every quarter.
“In the first quarter, transactions reached IDR 21.01 trillion. However, this figure decreased to IDR 16.1 trillion in the second quarter and IDR 4.1 trillion in the third quarter,” he said.
Sabar also emphasized the importance of public awareness of the dangers of online gambling.
“Online gambling carries various risks, such as addiction, financial losses, psychological impacts, and dangers to personal data security. The public needs to understand these risks so they don’t get caught up in it,” he said.
