Speaking at an event commemorating National Press Day on Thursday, Jokowi said the news industry “was not doing so well”.

“Big Tech’s algorithms tend to be concerned only with the commercial side of things and will push sensational and petty content that sacrifices the quality of authentic journalism. This should not dominate the life of our society,” the President said in his speech.

He said the government was drafting a regulation that would require digital platforms to pay the media outlets whose content they carried, noting that 60 percent of the country’s advertisement market was “dominated mainly by foreign digital platforms”.

The proposed regulation seeks to address publishers’ longstanding complaint that they are losing revenue to online aggregators. Tech giants, they say, benefit from the use of news content in search results and other features without paying for it.

Two separate drafts of the regulation are being discussed, one prepared by the Communications and Information Ministry and the other by members of the Press Council and other media associations, Jokowi noted.

“My suggestion is [that stakeholders should] convene this month. This presidential regulation must be finalized within a month at the latest, and I will be joining some of the discussions,” he said.

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