A Real Problem, A Blunt Proposed Fix
Muhammad Qodari, head of Indonesia's Government Communication Agency (Bakom), wants social media accounts linked to a phone number or the national ID card (KTP). Speaking on September 1, 2026, Qodari was direct about the logic: "Hoax usually comes from anonymous accounts. So reducing hoax is by reducing anonymous accounts... if we make anonymity non-anonymous, then hoax will decrease" (Detik News). He compared the idea to Indonesia's existing prepaid SIM card registration regime, under which mobile numbers are already tied to subscriber identity. The proposal follows government exploration since May 2026 of "a mechanism to make social media user identities clearer and ensure digital activities are accountable" (Biometric Update).
Steelmanning the Case for Real-Name Registration
The scale of the harm Qodari is responding to is not invented. Mafindo, Indonesia's anti-hoax society, reported on February 27, 2026 that Indonesians lost roughly Rp9.1 trillion (about US$542 million) to online fraud between November 2024 and January 2026, based on 432,637 reports filed with the Indonesia Anti Scam Center (The Jakarta Post). Mafindo chair Septiaji Eko Nugroho attributed much of this to regulatory gaps, not just low digital literacy. Investment fraud and "love scams" — where scammers build weeks-long romantic relationships before soliciting money — depend on the anonymity that lets a fabricated persona survive scrutiny. A verified identity behind an account would raise the cost of running these schemes, and give victims and platforms a real person to hold accountable rather than a burner number. Indonesia has also shown it is willing to build serious verification infrastructure for legitimate ends: Bakom itself piloted a facial-recognition system tied to KTP data in Surabaya's social assistance program, which cross-checked eligibility against utility, vehicle, and land records and caught a 25% inclusion-error rate in old beneficiary lists (ANTARA News, July 28, 2026). The state clearly has both the appetite and the technical capacity to do identity-linking at scale.
Why the Fix Doesn't Match the Problem
But fraud and disinformation are not, at their root, anonymity problems — they are enforcement and platform-design problems. Indonesia's Anti Scam Center already exists and already processes hundreds of thousands of reports; Mafindo's own diagnosis was that the ecosystem — inter-agency response speed, bank and platform cooperation, takedown latency — lags behind the fraud networks, not that scammers are unidentifiable in principle. WhatsApp, where Mafindo says "most" of these scams occur, does not require public account handles the way Instagram or X does, so a KTP-to-account mandate would have limited reach into the channel doing the most damage.
The deeper risk is what a mandatory real-identity regime does to everyone who isn't a scammer. Indonesia's Electronic Information and Transactions Law (UU ITE) has a long record of being used to prosecute government critics, journalists, and ordinary citizens for online speech. Stripping away anonymity doesn't just make it easier to catch fraudsters — it makes it easier to identify, intimidate, and prosecute whistleblowers, LGBTQ+ Indonesians, religious minorities, and critics of local officials who currently rely on pseudonymity for safety, not deception. A verified-identity mandate applied uniformly captures both groups; the proposal as described draws no distinction between them.
The Data-Security Problem Undercuts the Data-Security Justification
There is also a compliance track record worth weighing. Indonesia's Personal Data Protection Law (Law No. 27/2022) has been in full force since October 17, 2024, yet the country has suffered repeated large-scale breaches of exactly the KTP and Kartu Keluarga data this proposal would concentrate further inside social platforms' servers. Centralizing real-name identity data across every major platform multiplies the number of high-value targets for the same breaches the PDP Law was meant to prevent — while doing nothing to stop fraud conducted through channels, like WhatsApp, that this mandate likely can't reach anyway.
A Narrower Path Already Exists
Indonesia doesn't need to choose between anonymity and accountability wholesale. Government Regulation 17/2025 ("PP Tunas") and its implementing rule, Permenkomdigi No. 9/2026, already require platforms to verify user age for eight high-risk services — Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, Threads, YouTube, Bigo Live, and Roblox — without demanding every adult user surrender pseudonymity (Sekretariat Negara; InfoPublik). That model — targeted verification tied to a specific, narrow harm, with proportionate scope — is the template Bakom should be extending to fraud, not discarding in favor of a blanket identity mandate. Qodari himself has acknowledged the mechanism "still requires deep study" and that privacy protection has to be worked out before any regulation is drafted. That study should start from the premise that identity and anonymity are not opposites to be traded off, but tools that need separate, proportionate rules for separate harms.