Fact check: Meutya Hafid says Komdigi sought no forest fire takedowns

Claim: "There has been no takedown of content and no request for a takedown from Komdigi to restrict information about forest and land fires," Minister of Communication and Digital Affairs Meutya Hafid said in a press statement on 21 October 2026.

Verdict: Disputed. Komdigi stands by the denial and says its takedown records can be checked. Civil society monitors say at least five posts about the fires carried notices naming a Komdigi request, and they reported a geoblocked fire post before the minister spoke. Neither side's records have been independently matched yet, so the denial is contested rather than proven or disproven.

What the minister said

Meutya Hafid made the statement on 21 October 2026, as reported by Kompas and ANTARA. ANTARA reported that she said there was no takedown request to any social media platform operating in Indonesia over fire information. In a video posted on Instagram the same day, she said: "There is no request from Komdigi to restrict information about forest fires," according to CNN Indonesia. She said public information on the fires helps the government respond, and asked platforms to be transparent about their algorithms and community guidelines.

The statement came as users complained that fire posts were being removed or seeing lower reach, and as screenshots of Meta's chatbot, Meta AI, saying Instagram blocked content at Komdigi's request circulated on Threads. A chatbot's answer is not evidence. Komdigi said so, and asked Meta for clarification, CNN Indonesia reported on 23 October. NewsWLD found no public statement from Meta.

How to tell a government request apart

Komdigi itself has explained what a government request looks like to users. On 13 November 2026, Mediodecci Lustarini, secretary of Komdigi's Directorate General of Digital Space Supervision, said X sends users a notice that their content was removed at Komdigi's request, and that Meta shows a label naming Komdigi, according to Detik. She said content restricted without such a notice was not necessarily Komdigi's doing.

Such notices exist in other cases. BBC News Indonesia saw the message "Post not available in Indonesia. This is because we complied with a legal request from KOMDIGI to restrict this content" on a Magdalene post about the acid attack on activist Andrie Yunus in April 2026, BBC News Indonesia reported, and Komdigi confirmed it had acted on a public complaint, according to Kompas.

What the monitors found on fire content

SAFEnet and Remotivi, which collect reports from users, said in a release dated 12 November 2026 that 94 of 127 moderated posts they documented between April and 8 November were moderated at Komdigi's request, and that 13 posts were about the fires.

On fire content specifically, they said three X posts, two criticising President Prabowo's response and one about the fire in Way Kambas National Park, received notices of alleged violations of Indonesian law at Komdigi's request, as did one Instagram post with a cover photo of Prabowo and one Threads post criticising his handling of the Kalimantan fires, Katadata reported. Most of the fire reports came in mid October, when haze covered Kalimantan.

Earlier, in a release dated 8 September 2026, the groups said a Malaysian citizen's criticism of the Kalimantan fires had been geoblocked in Indonesia at Komdigi's request. That release came six weeks before the minister's denial.

The monitors also recorded removals that were not Komdigi's: TikTok removed the Siak regent's tree planting video and a Nalar Rawat video on carbon monoxide in Central Kalimantan under its own community guidelines, according to Katadata. Those cases are consistent with the minister's point that platforms act on their own.

NewsWLD has not seen the notices on the five fire posts and cannot say whether they cite the fires, the criticism of the president, or another legal ground.

Komdigi's response to the data

Komdigi did not accept the figures. On 13 November Mediodecci said the ministry could not find the 94 cases in its records by period and that the real figure "could be larger than that, or the reverse", according to CNN Indonesia. She said every request is logged electronically, cannot be altered and can be traced, that Komdigi was ready to match its records with the monitors' data, and that it would correct any moderation mistakes, according to Detik. She also said Komdigi was preparing a public notification system for access cuts after a Constitutional Court ruling, according to Katadata.

The monitors invited Komdigi to a public test of the data on 17 November 2026, CNN Indonesia reported. As of publication, no joint result had been released.

What platform transparency reports add

Platform reports confirm the scale of government requests in Indonesia but are too aggregated to settle this question. Meta's Indonesia page, whose latest listed period is January to June 2026, says it restricted over 20 million items for alleged violations of local law, mostly gambling, including about 16,000 items reported by Komdigi on illegal gambling and regulated goods, and over 200 items on Threads, according to the Meta Transparency Center. Google's latest data, for January to June 2025, show 1,794 requests from Indonesian authorities covering 20,190 items, 19,084 of them under regulated goods and services, according to NewsWLD's reading of the Google Transparency Report file. Neither breaks down requests by topic such as forest fires.

Conclusion

The minister's denial is specific and Komdigi says its records would bear it out. Against it, two digital rights groups say users showed them notices naming Komdigi on at least five fire posts, and Komdigi's own official has said such notices are how a government request can be recognised. Until the records are matched in public, or the platforms disclose the requests, the claim that Komdigi made no takedown request over fire content is disputed. NewsWLD will update this check after the 17 November data test or any platform disclosure.

Related: Fact check: no evidence Komdigi got Msbreewc's forest fire video taken down.