Damar Juniarto

Indonesian digital-rights organiser and the founder and longtime Executive Director of SAFEnet (Southeast Asia Freedom of Expression Network) — the principal Indonesian civil-society anchor on internet access, freedom of expression, digital security, and online gender-based violence. Born 5 June 1976, Juniarto founded SAFEnet on 27 June 2013 while still working in international advertising and led the organisation through its first decade, stepping down at the end of 2023 and being succeeded by Nenden Sekar Arum. He is in the make-AI-good corpus as the principal Indonesian organiser publicly identified with the digital-rights monitoring and advocacy register and, since his 2024 founding of PIKAT Demokrasi, with the Indonesian AI-and-democracy register.

Background and entry into digital rights

Juniarto studied Sociology and Communication with an Advertising major at Universitas Indonesia and entered the workforce through a ten-year career in advertising copywriting — Junior Copywriter at Lowe Lintas, then Leo Burnett and McCann, and finally Chief Operating Officer at Redmark Indonesia in 2017. The student-journalism and civic-tech-precursor period that bridged his earlier and later careers ran from 1992 through 1999, when he founded the school magazine Swara Petca (1993), the tabloid Arah (1996), and the campus magazine Kampus dan Kita (1997) and then helped establish what his own biographical record describes as Kampus dan Kita Online (1998-1999), one of Indonesia's first digital magazines, during the student-activist period around the fall of the Suharto regime.

He founded SAFEnet in 2013 alongside his advertising career, in direct response to the criminalising effect on online expression of Indonesia's Law No. 11 of 2008 on Information and Electronic Transactions (UU ITE) — the law whose broad defamation and "feeling offended" provisions had begun producing a steady stream of prosecutions of journalists, activists, and ordinary netizens for online speech. SAFEnet's original organisational rationale, as Juniarto framed it in his ARTICLE 19 activist interview, was to document those prosecutions, support the victims, and advocate for the law's reform; that founding programme expanded over the next decade into the four-pillar policy-advocacy / victim-support / capacity-building / solidarity structure SAFEnet now carries.

In 2018-2019 he stepped briefly out of full-time civil-society work to serve as Vice President of Regional Government Relations and Public Policy at GO-JEK, the Indonesian ride-hailing and platform-services company — a public-policy seat from which he returned to full-time SAFEnet leadership and from which he continued to engage Indonesian platform-governance debates as a civil-society interlocutor.

SAFEnet decade

The substantive line of work that has defined Juniarto's public role is the build-out of SAFEnet from a small advocacy network into the principal Indonesian civil-society digital-rights anchor. Across his 2013-2023 tenure as Executive Director, SAFEnet's signature advocacy artefact was the successful Papua and West Papua internet-shutdown lawsuit — the November 2019 filing at the Jakarta State Administrative Court (PTUN) against the Minister of Communication and Information and the President of Indonesia, and the 3 June 2020 ruling that the August-September 2019 shutdowns were an unlawful act, framed by Access Now as a #KeepItOn coalition precedent against arbitrary internet shutdowns in the region. SAFEnet's annual Digital Rights Situation Report of Indonesia series and its post-2019 holistic-security training programme — combining physical, psychosocial, and digital security training for human-rights defenders, journalists, women activists, and LGBTQ-community organisers — were both established during his tenure.

Juniarto founded several adjacent civic-tech and digital-rights-education vehicles alongside SAFEnet: Forum Demokrasi Digital in 2014, Kelas Muda Demokrasi Digital (Kemudi) in 2014 as an online school for young digital-democracy organisers, and Paguyuban Korban UU ITE (PAKU ITE) in 2015 as a victim-support and advocacy association of people prosecuted under the ITE Law. He served as an advisory board member of DigitalReach Asia from 2020 and was included in Rest of World's 2022 RoW100 Global Tech Changemakers list under the Policy / #digitalactivists segment for his work building SAFEnet into the principal Indonesian civil-society monitor of digital-rights violations. He stepped down as SAFEnet's Executive Director at the end of 2023; Nenden Sekar Arum — previously Head of SAFEnet's Freedom of Expression Division — succeeded him in 2023 and represented the organisation in its January 2025 accession to the Global Network Initiative.

PIKAT Demokrasi and the AI-and-democracy register

In January 2024, Juniarto founded PIKAT Demokrasi — Pusat Inovasi Kecerdasan Artifisial dan Teknologi untuk Demokrasi, the Center for AI and Technology Innovation for Democracy — as an independent Indonesian research institute on the use of artificial intelligence and digital technology in service of democratic values. His own account of PIKAT's origin places the founding moment at the late-January 2024 Indonesian Fifth Presidential Debate, at which the General Election Commission (KPU) had invited him as a panellist on digital-technology issues and where, watching the candidates' answers on the country's AI and digital-platform-governance posture, he concluded that Indonesia's regulatory infrastructure was unprepared for the generative-AI cycle. PIKAT's first research line, as he describes it, was the documentation of generative-AI and deepfake use in the 2024 Indonesian general election — including a Golkar-party deepfake reanimation of Suharto — and the analysis of how AI-shaped media environments are altering the structure of shared political reality, with the press's role as fourth pillar of democracy as the through-line.

His Reuters quote — that Indonesia is "not ready to be an AI developer" given its lack of chip infrastructure and its AI-skills gap in the workforce — captures PIKAT's stance on the Indonesian national AI strategy debate of 2025-2026. Alongside PIKAT, Juniarto has been an external consultant to the United Nations Secretary-General's AI Advisory Body since 2024, a Lecturer and Digital Politics coordinator at UPN Veteran Jakarta since August 2023, and from September 2024 the coordinator of the digital-platform cooperation division of KTP2JB — Komite Tata Kelola Platform Digital Jurnalisme Berkualitas, the Indonesian quality-journalism digital-platform-governance committee established under Government Regulation 32/2024 to mediate the relationship between Indonesian publishers and global platform companies.

Posture in the movement

Juniarto's distinctive contribution to the make-AI-good movement is the build-out of Indonesian civil-society monitoring and advocacy infrastructure across two registers — the digital-rights-and-freedom-of-expression register that SAFEnet now anchors, and the AI-and-democracy register that PIKAT Demokrasi has begun to articulate from the Indonesian vantage. His own characterisation of his stance toward the Indonesian digital landscape is as "an optimist" against the country's middling Freedom House internet-freedom rating, and his organising trajectory — from advertising copywriter to civil-society founder, from SAFEnet ED to research-institute founder and UN AI Advisory Body consultant — sits in the corpus as the first Indonesian-anchored career arc carrying both the regional digital-rights advocacy register and the AI-and-elections / AI-and-democracy register that the 2024 Indonesian election cycle made central.