An Indonesian social media influencer who suggested Jesus should cut his hair has been sentenced to two years and 10 months in jail after being found guilty of spreading hate speech against Christianity.
Ratu Thalisa, a Muslim transgender woman who has nearly 450,000 followers on TikTok, was sentenced by a court in North Sumatra province over the comments made to an image of Christ, according to a statement from rights group Amnesty International and local media reports.
Thalisa, who is known online as Ratu Entok, made the comments after a viewer said she should cut her hair to look like a man.
In a live broadcast on October 2, 2024, Thalisa held up a picture of Jesus Christ and said: “You should not look like a woman. You should cut your hair so that you will look like his father.”
Five Christian groups filed complaints to Indonesian police alleging blasphemy, leading to Thalisa’s arrest on October 8.
In addition to jail time, the court ordered Thalisa to pay a fine of around $6,200.
She was sentenced under Indonesia’s Electronic Information and Transactions (EIT) law after the court ruled that her comments could affect “public order” and “religious harmony.”
Amnesty International Indonesia’s Executive Director Usman Hamid said Monday that the “sentence is a shocking attack on Ratu Thalisa’s freedom of expression,” and that the EIT law should not be used to punish people for social media comments.
“While Indonesia should prohibit the advocacy of religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence, Ratu Thalisa’s speech act does not reach that threshold,” Hamid said in a statement.
According to Amnesty, from 2019 to 2024 at least 560 people were charged with alleged violations of the EIT Law under various offenses, including defamation and hate speech.
“This sentence highlights the increasingly arbitrary and repressive application of Indonesia’s EIT law to violate freedom of expression,” he added.
“The authorities must quash Ratu Thalisa’s conviction, ensure her immediate and unconditional release and repeal or make substantial revisions of problematic provisions in the EIT Law criminalizing “immorality,” defamation, and hate speech,” said Hamid.
Thalisa is one of a number of people convicted for blasphemy in recent years, most of them for insults to Islam.
Indonesia is the world’s largest Muslim nation, where 231 million people, at least 93% of its adult population, identify as Muslim.
Religious conservatism has been on the rise in the country in recent years and rights groups have warned that blasphemy laws are being “increasingly weaponized” against religious minorities and those deemed to have insulted Islam.
In September 2023, Muslim social media influencer Lina Lutfiawati, known as Lina Mukherjee on social media, was sentenced to two years in prison over a video she shared on TikTok which showed her reciting an Islamic prayer before trying pork.
One of Indonesia’s most high-profile blasphemy cases was that of Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, an ethnic Chinese Indonesian politician widely known as Ahok who served as Jakarta’s first non-Muslim governor in 50 years.
He went on trial for blasphemy in 2017 after angering hardline Muslims by referencing a verse from the Quran while campaigning for re-election in 2016. He was jailed for two years, despite making a public apology.