Language cases against UU ITE in Indonesia

Abstract

Since the law's enactment in 2008, language cases against the Undang-Undang Informarmasi dan Transaksi Electronic Republik of Indonesia (hereafter UU ITE), also known as the Electronic Information and Transaction of Republic of Indonesia Law, have risen year after year. One source of language cases against the law is social media messages, which are the result of their users' lack of legal and intellectual comprehension. Defamation, hate speech against specific persons or SARA (ethnicity, religion, race, intergroup), threats, decency, and obscenity are all prevalent components of the unpleasant content of legal-related social media text messages. The issues addressed in this study are (1) the category of language offence and (2) the microlinguistic and macrolinguistic analysis of the text type of offence. The objective, which is supported by a qualitative descriptive method within the Forensic Linguistics approach, is to identify a system of violations that could be justified based on linguistic facts. The findings demonstrate that texts with the potential to become legal cases can be proven by microlinguistic facts like word choices and grammatical structure, while macrolinguistic facts can support the microlinguistic elements like disregard for language ethics, lack of social media literacy, and lack of editing steps before text publication.