Last month, Facebook announced plans to start testing the move on a small portion of users in Indonesia, Brazil, Canada and the United States, which would also include a survey that worked to understand users’ preferences for political content over the next few months.

Facebook product management director Aastha Gupta said the tests excluded COVID-19 information from authoritative health organizations like the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the World Health Organization, as well as national and regional health agencies and services from affected countries. Content from official government agencies will also be exempt.

“It’s important to note that we’re not removing political content from Facebook altogether," Gupta said in a recent statement.

Facebook said the curb was planned in consideration of the “appetite” of its users, after previously finding that most did not want politics to take over their feeds.

Data collected last year from American users, for instance, showed that political content made up about 6 percent of what people see on the social platform.

The latest tests in the US began in mid-February, but by that time, Facebook and other Facebook-owned platforms had already been battered by criticism over their alleged promotion of unbalanced views and misinformation during critical moments, including the US elections.

Facebook Indonesia has confirmed the planned restriction tests in the country but declined to provide further details, referring instead to the official statements from Facebook headquarters.

In Indonesia, Facebook and other social media platforms have been blamed for exacerbating social unrest during political escalations, including the deadly Jakarta riots in May 2019, when the government eventually restricted access to their services.

Read also: Post-election unrest grips Jakarta

Experts believe that Facebook’s curb on political content would ease the political tensions among users in the country, but they also urged the company to do more.

Since 2019, Twitter and Google have restricted election ads by electoral candidates, political parties or government officials globally to prevent advertisers from targeting voters and perpetuating false claims.

Institute for Policy Research and Advocacy (ELSAM) executive director Wahyudi Djafar said his institute had found no electoral political ads on Twitter since the restrictions, including during the 2019 presidential election in Indonesia.

However, case studies conducted by ELSAM in collaboration with Privacy International (PI) concluded that there had been a lack of enforcement, as it had still found political ads falling within Twitter’s definition disseminated on the platform, including sponsored content posted by the national COVID-19 and economic recovery committee, which promoted a regulation on wage subsidies for private employees.

The studies also show insufficient coverage areas to which mandatory authorization requirements on Facebook and Google ads apply, leading to different degrees of political ad transparency among countries.

Besides mandatory authorization, measures of transparency recognized by PI include detailed information about each political ad posted, which Instagram has failed to provide, the study concluded.

In the 2019 general elections, ELSAM identified 73 political ads run on Instagram that had not been reported by their advertisers, and therefore, no detailed information of the ads was available when they failed to appear in the Facebook Ad Library.

“This is a serious problem because apart from the records of transparency on political ads, there is no regulation in Indonesia that specifically regulates the scope of political advertising,” Wahyudi told The Jakarta Post.

Beyond the electoral agenda, ELSAM also found political ads on government policies, such as campaigns on the integration of West Papua and Indonesia and the promotion of the Job Creation Law by the government and its affiliates, he said.

“So, the question for Facebook remains whether its restriction policy is solely aimed at electoral political ads or beyond that,” he added.

Southeast Asia Freedom of Expression Network (SAFEnet) executive director Damar Juniarto said fewer political campaigns on Facebook and other platforms would help reduce polarization among Indonesians.

“Polarization [in Indonesia] has been sharpened by social media algorithms that determine how far users are exposed to the information sent according to their characteristics,” he said.

He argued that though the campaigns of the President and his Cabinet members were valid in the context of freedom of expression, they needed to be reduced and exclude information that could blind the objectivity of internet users.

Read also: Social media influencers key actors in democracy: Palace

The government has denied using so-called “buzzers” to promote its policies, claiming that it only hired social media influencers to help educate the public.

“The government mobilizing people to create opinions does not lead to a healthy dialogue on whether the policies can be accepted by all citizens or not,” Damar said.

This was exacerbated by the low digital literacy of the Indonesian people, he added, especially for “digital immigrants” who had insufficient understanding of the use of digital platforms and the critical instincts to assess their content.