Indonesian Digital Journalism at the Crossroads of Regulation and Literacy
PP Tunas opens important opportunities: when digital platforms are required to implement age verification and content classification, the ecosystem can become more structured, allowing quality journalistic content to gain more proportionate distribution.
Jakarta (ANTARA) - Imagine a 15-year-old teenager spending seven hours a day on TikTok. Their For You Page is filled with entertainment content, tutorial videos, and viral trends. However, no serious journalistic content ever appears there.
This is not because the teenager does not care about the world, but because the machine working behind the scenes — which we know as the algorithm — has already decided that this is the most relevant content for them.
The figure of seven hours is not fiction. A joint study by the Ministry of Communication and Digital (Komdigi) and UNICEF in 2024–2025 found that more than 80 percent of Indonesian children access the internet every day with an average duration like that.
This fact becomes one of the strongest empirical foundations behind the birth of Government Regulation Number 17 of 2025 on the Governance of Electronic System Operators in Child Protection, or more commonly known as PP Tunas.
It is at this point that journalism faces its greatest paradox in the new media era: news now lives and dies on the same platforms where entertainment content proliferates. Two major forces are colliding — regulation and algorithms — and Indonesia’s journalism ecosystem is caught between them.
The Invisible Editor
For more than a century, journalism has operated in a linear flow: reporters cover, editors filter, and then the public reads. This model is known as gatekeeping, the process where information passes through several “gates” before reaching the reader.
Stephen Reese and Pamela Shoemaker, in their study published in the journal Mass Communication and Society, developed this concept into a hierarchy of influences model, showing that media content is shaped by layered influences — from individual journalists, work routines, media organisations, to broader social institutional pressures.
The new media era has fundamentally changed this model.
According to records from the Indonesian Press Council, out of 1,852 verified media outlets in Indonesia, 54.8 percent are now online.
The consequences are dramatic: the old gates have not disappeared, but they now face a new competitor that is far more powerful. Search engines and social media act as “invisible editors” that determine which news appears at the top of the screen and which sinks.
Joshua Wallace, in the journal Digital Journalism, refers to this phenomenon as contemporary gatekeeping, where individuals, algorithms, and platforms collectively take over the role of news selection that was once the exclusive domain of editorial teams.
This condition is found concretely in a case study by Fajar Gumiliara and colleagues, published in the Journal of Communication Science and Social Media (JKOMDIS) in 2025: in digital newsrooms, editors at Pikiran Rakyat and Bola.com not only edit content but also optimise headlines, images, and metadata to align with the logic of search engine and social media algorithms.