The writer is Head of Advocacy at The Legal Aid Center for The Press (LBH Pers), and one of the lawyers representing Khariq Anhar in court. The views expressed are personal.

Five months in prison is the price Khariq Anhar has been ordered to pay for a piece of digital criticism made through timpa teks, a form of editing text over an existing image or screenshot.

Khariq was convicted under Article 32(1) of the Electronic Information and Transactions Law (UU ITE). His offense was changing the text in a screenshot of a news report concerning Said Iqbal’s statement about the August 2025 demonstrations. Khariq used timpa teks to criticise that statement. The Central Jakarta District Court’s October 7, 2026 decision may look like the conclusion of an ordinary criminal case. It is not.

The case raises a more consequential question: what happens when the state begins treating the way citizens express dissent as a criminal act?

Khariq is also part of a much larger story. Data from the Gerakan Muda Lawan Kriminalisasi (GLMK), cited in a report by the Komisi Pencari Fakta, recorded at least 480 people from the August–September Protests as having been convicted by February 15, 2026. The significance of that number is not simply its scale but also what some of those cases tell us about how protest itself is changing.  Protest is no longer confined to streets, banners, and megaphones. It happens through Instagram stories, memes, digital posters, screenshots, reposts and edited images. The form are fasters, more visual and more closely connected to internet culture. Yet several people arrested after the August protests found these contemporary forms of political expression turned into criminal cases.

Laras Faizati, for example, was prosecuted after posting Instagram Stories expressing anger and frustration over the Death of Affan Kurniawan during the August demonstrations. Prosecutors charged her among other provisions, under Article 28(2) and Article 32(2) of the UU ITE, as well as Article 160 and 161 of the Criminal Code. She was ultimately convicted under Article 161 and sentenced to six months’ imprisonment, with the imprisonment ordered not to be served and replaced by one year of supervision.

Then there was Muhammad Yasirillah, a 19-year-old from Cibinong. His form of protest was more physical and deliberately simple, he put up two posters criticizing the police over their violent conduct. The act was documented by others and circulated on social media. Yasir was charged under Article 28(2) of the UU ITE and Article 160 of the Criminal Code. He was ultimately convicted under Article 160 and sentenced to six months’ imprisonment, suspended for an eight-month probation period.

The details differ. So do the legal provisions and outcomes. But the pattern is worth noticing, political expression is increasingly mediated through forms that did not exist, or did not carry the same social significance, when many criminal laws were drafted. The question, then, is not whether every meme, poster or Instagram Story deserves legal protection. Clearly, expression can cross legal boundaries. The question is whether criminal law is capable of distinguishing unlawful conduct from the increasingly creative ways in which citizens communicate dissent. Khariq’s case demonstrates the danger when it cannot.

Article 32 (1) of the UU ITE prohibits, among other things, intentionally and unlawfully changing, adding to, reducing, transmitting, damaging, deleting, moving or concealing electronic information or documents belonging to another person or the public. The word ‘changing’, however, cannot be read in isolation. Criminal law does not operate by matching a single verb in a statute with a single physical act. The element of an offense must be assessed as a whole, including the object protected by the provision, the nature of the conduct, its context and the facts established at trial.

Khariq did not alter the original news report. He took a screenshot of material already available in the public domain and placed different text over it. He did not access the original source’s electronic system and replace the document stored there. He created a new digital object from a screenshot and used it as a vehicle for criticism. That distinction is not merely technical. Changing another person’s electronic document so that the original document itself is altered is one thing. Creating a new visual work by transforming material already in the public domain to express criticism is another.

The same logic underlies memes, parody and satire. They take something that already exists and place it in a new context to convey a different meaning. If every such act is reduced to the proposition that “the electronic information was changed”, criminal law loses its ability to distinguish manipulation from expression. The court heard evidence about precisely this distinction. An expert explained that timpa teks is a common form of digital communication used to express criticism, satire and responses to public statements. A witness likewise explained that timpa teks, memes and satirical posters are part of internet culture. Yet these facts were not given sufficient weight by the majority of the panel. 

The presiding judge issued a dissenting opinion, finding that the elements of Article 32(1) had not been established and that Khariq should have been acquitted. That dissent matters because it shows that a legally coherent path to acquittal was available. The facts were there. The expert testimony was there. So was the context, Khariq was responding to a public statement concerning an ongoing political event. What was missing was the willingness or ability of the majority panel to bring those facts together into a consistent legal analysis. The majority stopped at the fact that the text had been changed and treated that fact as sufficient to establish Article 32(1). But the role of a judge is not to find one fact that appears to correspond with a statutory phrase. It is to determine whether every element of a criminal offense has actually been proven and whether the resulting interpretation makes sense when applied to the conduct before the court.

Digital democracy does not consist only of carefully written opinion pieces, policy papers and formal political speeches. People also participate through memes, satire, reaction images, short videos, parody, posters and other forms of visual communication. Their forms change because the culture of communication changes. Some of these forms will be crude. Some will be provocative. Some will be annoying. Some will be unfair. But being uncomfortable, provocative or satirical does not by itself make an expression criminal.

The state certainly has a legitimate interest in protecting people from harmful manipulation of information. But that interest must be pursued proportionately and with a clear distinction between deception and expression. Criminal law cannot become a tool for deciding which methods of criticism are acceptable. Otherwise, the message is not simply that certain speech is prohibited. The message is that citizens must be careful about how creatively they dissent. That is a dangerous standard for a democracy.

The cases emerging from the August protests show why. A young man puts up a poster; A woman posts an angry Instagram Story; A student edits a news screenshot. These are different acts, governed by different legal provisions and presenting different factual circumstances. Yet they share one important feature, each reflects a generation of citizens using the tools and language of contemporary culture to participate in political debate. The law must be able to recognize that participation without becoming ignorant to its context.

Khariq has paid the immediate price – five months of his freedom. The larger cost may be harder to measure. It is paid when citizens begin to hesitate before making a meme, parodying a public statement, putting up a protest poster or responding creatively to those in power because they fear that the form of their criticism may itself become evidence of a crime.