Yakub Mulyono, Jember – Hundreds of students from the Muhammadiyah 5 Vocational High School (SMK) in Jember, East Java, have uninstalled WhatsApp (WA) from their mobile phones as a form of protest because WA can access content that contains pornography.
Before uninstalling WA, the students gathered on the school grounds and held up posters slamming pornographic content on WA and urging the students to delete the application.
“We and all of our friends have agreed to uninstall this application because we are afraid of unintentionally seeing things that we shouldn’t see”, one of the students Hani Olivia told journalists on Tuesday November 7.
According the Computer Technology and Networking vocational student, she found out that WA has pornographic contents from reports in the media. After checking, it turned out that the reports were indeed true. In the end she and her friends agreed to uninstall the application from their phones.
“We deleted it immediately. We only found out that there was improper content from media reports”, said Hani.
SMK Muhammadiyah 5 Jember school principle Abduroziq supported his student’s actions and along with other teachers at the school also uninstalled WA from their mobile phones.
According to Abduroziq, they agreed they would only use WA again when the content that smacks of pornography is removed. “Up until now there is still content in it that smacks of pornography, so we won’t be using WA”, he asserted.
Abduroziq also hopes that policy makers will take immediate action because there are already more than 1 billion users of the WA application.
“Many of these of course are children. If there is pornographic content, it could poison their minds”, he said. (iwd/iwd)
[Translated by James Balowski. The original title of the article was Tolak Konten Porno, Pelajar di Jember Hapus Aplikasi WA.]
