An Indonesian social media influencer has been sentenced to nearly three years in prison after making a remark about Jesus during a livestream.
Ratu Thalisa, a transgender woman with over 442,000 TikTok followers, was responding to a comment telling her to cut her hair to appear more masculine.
In response, she jokingly addressed an image of Jesus on her phone, telling him to do the same.
This led to her being charged with blasphemy under Indonesia’s controversial online hate speech law.
On Monday 10th March, a court in Medan, Sumatra, found Thalisa guilty of spreading hatred and sentenced her to two years and ten months in prison.
The court justified the ruling by stating that her words threatened public order and religious harmony.
Multiple Christian groups had filed police complaints against her, leading to her arrest and trial.
The verdict has sparked widespread criticism from human rights organisations, including Amnesty International, which condemned it as an attack on freedom of speech.
Amnesty International Indonesia’s executive director, Usman Hamid, stated that the country’s Electronic Information and Transactions (EIT) law should not be used to prosecute individuals for comments made on social media.
He told the BBC that while inciting religious hatred should be prohibited, Thalisa’s remarks did not meet that threshold.
Hamid urged the authorities to overturn her conviction, secure her immediate release, and revise problematic provisions of the EIT law, particularly those concerning morality, defamation, and hate speech.
Originally introduced in 2008 and amended in 2016, the EIT law was intended to regulate online conduct, but human rights advocates argue that it has been misused to suppress free expression.
Between 2019 and 2024, at least 560 people were charged under the law, with 421 convictions recorded, many involving social media influencers.
Prosecutors had initially sought a prison sentence of more than four years and have since appealed the court’s decision. Thalisa has been given seven days to appeal the ruling.