Late last month, two musicians from Indonesian punk band Sukatani sat before a camera, unmasked for the first time. Syifa “Alectroguy” Al Lutfi and Novi “Twister Angel” Citra Indriyati, who had previously performed in anonymity, addressed the national police chief and issued a solemn apology. Their crime? A song.
Pay Pay Pay, a protest anthem, accused the Indonesian police of systemic bribery. “Wanna get a driver’s licence? Pay the police,” they sang. “Wanna evict homes? Pay the police! … Wanna clear the forest? Pay the police.” It was an obvious provocation in a country where corruption remains a widespread concern. But it was not until two officers from the National Police Cybercrimes Unit and four from Central Java’s cyber division paid them a visit that things took a more ominous turn.
Days later, the musicians released an apology video, imploring listeners to delete the song. Twister Angel soon lost her job as a teacher at an Islamic school, officially for violating modesty laws, though widely seen as retaliation. Amnesty International’s Indonesia director, Usman Hamid, said it would have been “impossible” for the band to apologise to the police chief without pressure, while Indonesia’s Legal Aid Institute likewise “strongly suspected” coercion was involved.
If this was an attempt at reputational damage control, it failed. Far from disappearing, Pay Pay Pay has since taken on a new life, becoming an anthem for student protests against President Prabowo Subianto’s government. Demonstrators chanted its chorus during rallies marking the president’s first 100 days in office. As one commentator in the Jakarta Post put it, “The police’s reactive and repressive response is a direct violation of constitutional principles. If left unchecked, such actions risk eroding the system of constitutional government.”
By exerting pressure on the musicians to issue a public retraction, the authorities hoped to neutralise their critique. Instead, they demonstrated its validity. The band’s original protest was not simply about corruption, but about the lack of accountability that enables it – a point made all the more forcefully by the spectacle of law enforcement pressuring artists into compliance.
This pattern is not unique to Indonesia. Across Western democracies, state and corporate actors have embraced subtler forms of coercion to regulate speech deemed politically or socially undesirable. While outright censorship remains rare, indirect pressure – or what might be called ‘soft’ censorship – mechanisms have proven just as effective at chilling dissent.
Until recently, the prevailing consensus in liberal democracies was that the best response to controversial or misleading speech was counterspeech – the principle that bad ideas are best confronted through open debate rather than prohibition. John Stuart Mill, John Milton, and even the American Supreme Court in Brandenburg v. Ohio articulated variations of this principle: better arguments, not suppression, should win the day.
Yet in the years following Brexit and Donald Trump’s first electoral victory, that doctrine has been quietly abandoned. Many policymakers and media elites concluded that the rise of populist politics was not simply a rejection of their authority, but a consequence of misinformation and manipulation. The problem, as they saw it, was not that the public was unconvinced by their arguments, but that it was being deceived by ‘bad actors’.
The solution, increasingly, has been to bypass debate altogether and regulate speech at the level of infrastructure, whether through ‘fake news’ and ‘disinformation’ laws that pressure individuals and organisations into self-censorship; financial services withdrawing access for the politically undesirable, forcing them to choose between silence and survival; or the emergence of perception-based ‘non-crime hate incidents’ (NCHIs), which, once logged on a person’s record, can appear on background employment checks and quietly render them unemployable.
The trouble with this approach, as Indonesia’s experience illustrates, is that it rarely succeeds on its own terms. If suppression were an effective tool, Pay Pay Pay would have been quietly removed, its critique forgotten. Instead, the authorities’ attempt to control the narrative has amplified it, turning what might have been a niche protest song into a rallying cry for wider dissent.
This is the fundamental flaw of coercion. Political speech, once politicised by its restriction, becomes more potent, more defiant, and more difficult to challenge. Trust in institutions does not increase when they attempt to silence criticism; it erodes further.
In the long run, the case for counterspeech was not just moral but pragmatic. The assumption underpinning the liberal tradition was that exposure, rather than prohibition, was the best mechanism for refining truth and discrediting falsehoods. When that process is short-circuited through coercion, opposition is rarely neutralised, and it is sometimes radicalised.
Indonesia’s attempt to coerce Sukatani into silence may be dismissed as the overreach of an authoritarian-leaning government. But the basic dynamic at play, with a governing elite seeking to shield itself from critique through indirect pressure, is one increasingly visible across Western democracies. The tools may differ, but the principle is the same.
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