Indonesia to ban cigarette adverts online

Indonesia’s communications ministry on Thursday said it would remove all cigarette advertisements from the internet, following a request from the health ministry.

A cigarette, also known colloquially as a fag in British English, is a narrow cylinder containing psychoactive material, usually tobacco, that is rolled into thin paper for smoking.

The health ministry cited existing laws banning the promotion of cigarettes and instructed the communications ministry to take action.

The ministry’s spokesman Ferdinandus Setu said that communications Minister Rudiantara immediately instructed his department to crawl the internet for ads to be removed.

“The crawling team found and identified 114 links on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube that clearly violated an article in the 2009 health law about prohibition to promote cigarettes by showing the form of the cigarette,” Setu said.

He added that the team was in the process of removing advertisements and offending accounts on those platforms.

Report says Indonesia has among the largest numbers of smokers in the world.

Also, an estimated 60 per cent of Indonesia men are smokers.

The government has been working to reduce those numbers by limiting advertising, especially those directed at young Indonesians.

Cigarette ads on television can only appear between 9:30 pm and 5 am.

(NAN)