15 SEP 2026 — Indonesia may require large global platforms to open representative offices in the country, its communications minister said this week, and she named the platform that prompted it. "X does not yet have a representative office in Indonesia; consequently, coordination, monitoring and evaluation are difficult," Meutya Hafid said, adding that if platforms do not comply voluntarily, the government may be forced to revise or add regulations to make it compulsory.
The number behind the frustration came out of the same review. X had locked about 250,000 accounts belonging to users under 16, against an estimate of around seven million child accounts on the platform.
What the ministry is reviewing
The minister was speaking after a government evaluation of PP Tunas, Indonesia's child online protection regulation, which has restricted social media access for under-16s since March. Under it, eight platforms are classified as high-risk: YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, X, Bigo Live and Roblox.
Alexander Sabar, the ministry's director-general of digital space supervision, said a requirement for platforms to keep offices in Indonesia is now a subject for further review. The route would be the implementing regulations under the Electronic Information and Transactions Law. At present, Indonesian law does not explicitly require foreign digital service providers to maintain a local representative office.
The enforcement machinery already exists. Ministerial Regulation No. 9 of 2026 classifies platforms as high-risk and requires them to restrict children's access, and the ministry can issue up to three notices to a non-compliant platform before moving to sanctions. With X, it has rules to enforce and no counterpart in the country to enforce them against.
The ministry's overall figure was more positive. Around 28 million Indonesian child accounts received protection from digital risks over the six-month evaluation period, according to the minister.
Why an office is leverage
A representative office sounds administrative, but it is the difference between a regulator that can act and one that can only write letters.
A company with staff and an address in the country can be summoned, served, fined and held to deadlines. A company without one is reached through email to a regional headquarters in another jurisdiction, on that headquarters' timetable. Indonesia's experience with the child-protection rules has made the gap concrete: earlier this year, it issued repeated summonses to Google and Meta when they sought more time to comply. Both have a presence in the country to receive them. X does not.
Reading the X figure
The two numbers the ministry gave for X imply a locking rate of roughly 3.6 per cent of estimated child accounts. That figure is our arithmetic, not the ministry's.
The comparison has limits. The seven million is an estimate, and the ministry has not published how it was reached; age estimation on social platforms is imprecise in both directions. Some of the gap may also reflect accounts that belong to children but are registered as adults, which no platform can lock without better age signals than a self-declared birthday. None of that closes a gap of this size. The ministry is implicitly arguing that platforms with local teams have done more, and X has not answered that publicly in anything we have seen.
The wider pattern
Other governments in the region want platforms within reach too. They have pushed for local registration, local data handling and local points of contact, for reasons that range from child safety and fraud to tax and content control. The same office that makes a platform answerable on child protection also makes it answerable on takedown demands of every other kind, and rights groups in the region have long pointed out that the two are hard to separate once the legal duty exists.
That argument is about how the power is used, not whether it should exist, and Indonesia's current push is framed around children. Still, a requirement written for one purpose tends to be used for others.
Malaysia is building age verification around national identity to decide who may hold an account. Indonesia is looking at how to reach the companies holding those accounts at all.
What to watch
X has three options. It can open an office, appoint a local legal representative, or decline and wait for a regulation. Whichever it picks will show how it weighs the Indonesian market.
The size threshold will matter. The minister said the ministry is assessing which platforms would count as major, and where that line falls will decide whether the rule touches a handful of global companies or a much longer list.
Until the ITE implementing rules are published, this is a warning rather than a requirement, and the details — deadlines, penalties, and what powers attach to a local office — will decide how much it changes.
