INDONESIA may issue on Tuesday (Sep 26) a regulation on the use of social media to sell goods in the country, President Joko Widodo said, in a move intended to quell threats to offline markets in South-east Asia’s biggest economy.

Ministers have repeatedly said that e-commerce sellers using predatory pricing on social media platforms are threatening offline markets in Indonesia. Some officials specifically cited the video platform TikTok as an example.

“We just...decided on the use of social media for e-commerce. Tomorrow, it will perhaps come out,” Widodo, who is commonly known as Jokowi, said in a streamed video address on Monday.

“What the people are expecting is that the advancement of technology can create new economic potential, not kill existing economies.”

He did not mention specific companies or offer further details on the regulation, which is being formulated by the trade ministry.

Current trade regulations do not specifically cover direct transactions on social media.

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Deputy Trade Minister Jerry Sambuaga said earlier this month that “social media and social commerce cannot be combined”, vowing to ban mixing the two and citing TikTok’s “live” features which enable people to sell goods.

A TikTok Indonesia spokesperson declined to comment. TikTok is owned by Chinese tech company ByteDance.

The company said that its app had 325 million South-east Asian users that were active every month, of whom 125 million were in Indonesia. The company added that there were 2 million small businesses on TikTok Shop in Indonesia. REUTERS