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bdurrahman Balatif, 62, never knew that his eldest son, Muhammad Farhan Balatif, an 18-year-old vocational high school student in Medan, North Sumatra, was a popular if notorious social media user who had gained nationwide attention.

He said his son Muhammad spent most of his time on the internet and rarely talked to other people, including his parents.

“I don’t know what happened. He’s naive and does not socialize,” he told The Jakarta Post. “We do not talk very often when he’s home. He used to play the internet in his room,” he added.

Little did Abdurrahman know that from his bedroom Farhan had been spreading inflammatory messages against President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo and National Police chief Gen. Tito Karnavian on two of his fake social media accounts.

On Monday, three days after his arrest, Farhan was officially charged under the Electronic Information and Transactions (ITE) Law for allegedly insulting the President and the police chief.

He is the latest and could be the youngest person to be charged under the draconian law, highlighting the urgency for Indonesians, regardless of their position, to exercise extreme caution in expressing their opinions online.

Farhan was presumably confident that the cloak of anonymity would protect him from criminal charges.

On the web, he was known as Ringgo Abdullah or Raketen Warnung. Writing anonymously and using pictures of other people as his fake-account profile pictures, he aggressively attacked Jokowi and Tito through dozens of posts insulting the two figures.

He even challenged the police to arrest him as he was convinced that the authorities would never be able to trace him and reveal his true identity.

“Where is the ITE Law when I insult Jokowi? Could the police arrest me?,” he wrote on his Facebook account on July 13.

Farhan allegedly edited and posted a number of photos in order to insult Jokowi and Tito after he claimed that he was angered by Jokowi’s policies that hurt the poor.

On one occasion, he put faces of Jokowi and Tito on a pig’s body.

“I hate President Joko Widodo’s policies and our national debt has increased under his government and people cannot find jobs. That explains the motive behind my decision. This was purely my decision,” Farhan told the Post at the North Sumatra Police office on Monday.

Farhan also explained that he hated Tito because he was too slow in eradicating illegal levies in government institutions.

The police arrested Farhan at his house in North Medan sub-district in North Sumatra on Friday shortly after he communicated with someone on Facebook.

From his house, the police confiscated a number of items of evidence including two laptops that he used to edit photos, one flash disk of 16 gigabytes that reportedly contained pictures of Jokowi, three cell phones and a router.

North Sumatra Police chief Insp. Gen. Paulus Waterpauw said the police had monitored Farhan’s activities for a month before moving to arrest him, adding that the suspect also stole a Wi-Fi connection from his neighbor to connect to the internet to spread his messages.

Jokowi’s administration received criticism this year following a string of arrests of people accused of distributing false information about the President on social media, under the severe ITE law.

State Islamic University (UIN) Syarif Hidayatullah Jakarta political expert Adi Prayitno said these arrests were symptoms of the current administration’s tendency to stamp out criticism.

“Problems should not be resolved by naming someone a criminal suspect. Doing so will create the image that the government is repressive,” Adi said.