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Indonesian Facebook Group With Over 600 Illicit Images Of Children Busted By Police

The group had over 7,000 members and shared images with 11 other child porn groups on Facebook.

A recent investigation by the BBC found that Facebook failed to remove child porn from groups on the network. This sparked movement by governments to tackle child porn on Facebook, this crackdown has reached the shores of Indonesia. On March 14, a major Indonesian pedophile group was busted by the Jakarta Police.

The National Police arrested four administrators of a Facebook group called "Official Candy's Group." The group, which had 7,479 members, was allegedly part of an international pedophile network.

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The "Candy's" group was alleged to have over 600 examples of child pornography within the group. "Based on our investigation, there were 600 explicit posts, 500 videos and 100 photographs," Commander Hadiningrat told detik.com.

Jakarta Police Special Crimes Director Sr. Comr. Wahyu Hadiningrat confirmed that the admin of the group was connected to 11 pedophile groups in nine countries, including Peru and United States. "One of the admins, with initials W.W., was connected to other child pornography groups. Through the Facebook group, we tracked down conversations in WhatsApp and Telegram and found 11 more international groups," Officer Hadiningrat said.

Abimanyu Wachjoehidajat, a technology and security expert at the University of Indonesia, warned parents to be cautious when uploading content featuring their children to the internet. "Imagine a parent uploading pictures of their children, these pictures will stay on the internet forever, even if the child or parent delete the picture at some point," explained Abimanyu to VICE Indonesia.

In this social media era, it has become more common for people to upload pictures of their children to Instagram. Cinta Ruhama Amelz, a social media influencer who often uploads pictures of her children, advised strongly against disclosing too much information about parent's children online.

This notion was also confirmed by Aisyah Khairunnisa who posts a lot of pictures of her children online. She recommended using certain tricks when uploading photos of loved ones. "I play it safe when posting pictures of my children by putting on watermark on them," Aisyah said.

Abimanyu added that parents should not carelessly upload photos of their children. "If children are supposed to have the same rights as adults, then parents probably would say 'oh it's my children' and protect them. However, they need to be aware the responsibilities that come with it, that's why one shouldn't just carelessly upload anything of their children."

Previously, the government of Indonesia considered revising the punishment for sexual predators, considered by many as too lenient on pedophiles. Even though chemical castration is a punishment for those who commit sexual assaults, people who spread child porn can get as little as 3 years according to law No.23/2002 regarding the protection of children.