The TikTok logo on the screen of a phone in Arlington, Virginia, April 13, 2020 (AFP/Archives/Olivier DOULIERY)
TikTok reacted strongly on Wednesday to Indonesia’s announcement of a plan to ban commercial transactions on social networks, with Jakarta highlighting the risks of the monopolistic position of the social media giants.
“Nearly two million Indonesian businesses use TikTok to prosper and grow through commerce on the social network,” Anggini Setiawan, TikTok’s communications manager in Indonesia, told AFP.
“Forcing social media and e-commerce to separate into different platforms would not only harm innovation but also disadvantage Indonesian merchants and customers,” she added, calling on Indonesia to “provide rules a fair game for TikTok.
On Tuesday, Indonesia’s Deputy Commerce Minister Jerry Sambuaga told a parliamentary hearing that one must “differentiate between e-commerce, social media and social commerce.”
Deploring insufficient regulation of e-commerce on social networks, he called for a change in the current legal framework.
“A review… will prohibit this firmly and explicitly,” he added, without further specifying the details of this project, while current Indonesian regulations do not regulate transactions via social media.
On Monday, Indonesian Commerce Minister Zulkifli Hasan indicated that a review of the legal framework could force companies to apply for separate licenses to operate social media and e-commerce.
The Indonesian Minister in charge of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), Teten Masduki, for his part, according to the press, indicated last week that companies could no longer combine social media and e-commerce, believing that TikTok could become ” a monopoly.
A subsidiary of Chinese tech giant ByteDance, TikTok is not the only one to offer transactions on its social network. The American giant Meta also offers it on its Facebook and Instagram platforms.
Indonesia is the second largest market for TikTok with 125 million users, according to the company.
Last June, during a visit to Jakarta, Shou Zi Chew, the CEO of ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, announced that the group would invest “billions of dollars” in Southeast Asia over the next few years, where TikTok has 325 million users.
© 2023 AFP
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