Indonesia is planning to ban the sale of goods through social media, the deputy trade minister said at a parliamentary hearing on Tuesday.
The country has argued that predatory pricing by e-commerce vendors on social media platforms was endangering offline markets in Southeast Asia’s largest economy.
Direct transactions on social media are not particularly covered by current commerce legislation.
“Social media and social commerce cannot be combined,” Jerry Sambuaga, deputy minister of trade, told the parliament.
“Revisions to the trade regulations that are currently under way will firmly and explicitly ban this,” Sambuaga added.
TikTok, which has 2 million Indonesian sellers, previously stated it had no plans to launch a cross-border business there after officials voiced concerns the company’s e-commerce push could flood the country with Chinese goods.
ByteDance, a major Chinese tech company, owns TikTok. The company claimed that 125 million of the app’s 325 million monthly active Southeast Asian users were in Indonesia.
