Indonesian minister set to meet Google over AI-powered crackdown on online gambling

Budi Arie Setiadi, Indonesia’s Minister of Communication and Informatics, said he is planning to meet Google’s representatives to address the issue of online gambling within the country.

Setiadi stated that the upcoming meeting will center on Google's commitment to leveraging its technology, particularly artificial intelligence (AI), to combat online gambling within the digital space, Indonesian news agency ANTARA reported.

Highlighting Google's recent focus on AI-driven innovations over the past year, Setiadi expressed confidence that similar initiatives could be applied in Indonesia to combat online gambling, which the government perceives to undermine public morality.

"As a form of their participation in government programs, they help us to eradicate online gambling by AI," the minister was quoted as saying in the report.

Over the past year, the Indonesian government has intensified efforts to combat online gambling activities in the digital space.

In late May, President Joko Widodo reestablished the national task force dedicated to eradicating online gambling. Spearheaded by Hadi Tjahjanto, Coordinating Minister for Politics, Law, and Security, the integrated unit operates across ministries and institutions with a mandate to dismantle the online gambling ecosystem within Indonesia.

During the period spanning from July 17, 2023, to May 22, 2024, the Ministry of Communication and Informatics, tasked with prevention efforts, blocked access to 1,918,520 instances of online gambling content. Additionally, the ministry shut down 18,877 online gambling page inserts on educational platforms and 22,714 on government websites within the same timeframe.

The ministry's monitoring efforts also identified 20,241 online gambling-related keywords on Google from November 7, 2023, to May 22, 2024, followed by 2,702 keywords on Meta's social networking platform from December 15, 2022, to May 22, 2024, the report said.