Indonesia’s TikTok Habit Now Comes With a State Leash

ByteDance’s ad tools counted 180 million TikTok users aged 18 and over in Indonesia in late 2025, still the largest adult audience on the app. Two years earlier, We Are Social and Meltwater’s October 2024 global digital snapshot had already put that same country on top, at more than 165 million adults.

Marketers read those files as a gold seam of time, games, and weekly carts. Ministries in Jakarta read the same density as a pipe they could throttle, from checkout to children’s accounts.

Vietnam Pays for Content, Then Barely Watches TV

Kepios founder Simon Kemp, walking through that October file, flagged Vietnam as it crossed 100 million people, the sixteenth country to do so on revised United Nations figures. About 78.8 percent of residents were online. Once they were on the network, GWI’s survey of 53 countries found a public that pays, plays, and shops, and almost ignores linear television.

Global context sat in the same deck. Kepios counted 5.52 billion internet users (67.5 percent of 8.18 billion people) and 5.22 billion social media identities. GWI put typical daily time online at 6 hours and 36 minutes, and typical social time at 2 hours and 19 minutes, down 8.6 percent from 2 hours and 31 minutes in the third quarter of 2022. Connected adults worldwide played games at an 84.1 percent rate. Vietnam cleared that bar by a wide margin.

VIETNAM’S CONNECTED HABITS IN THE OCTOBER 2024 SURVEY

• Weekly carts: 59 percent of adult internet users made at least one online purchase every week.
• Paid media: 74.1 percent of adult internet users paid for some kind of digital content each month.
• Games: 94 percent of internet users played video games, third among GWI’s 53 countries.
• Television: Average TV time was 2 hours and 12 minutes a day, last among those 53 countries.
• Streaming share: When Vietnamese viewers did watch TV, on-demand services accounted for more than half of that time.

Kepios also ranked Vietnam sixth for the share of internet users on at least one social platform each month. Facebook’s Android app took 24 hours and 11 minutes a month there, against 18 hours and 44 minutes globally, while Instagram sessions lagged hard (83.7 a month against 351.1 worldwide). data.ai’s global TikTok average on Android was 34 hours and 15 minutes a month; Vietnamese users spent almost 10 hours more than that benchmark.

The empty TV set is the other face of that phone. Time that used to sit with broadcasters now sits with games, feeds, and checkout.

The World’s Largest TikTok Audience Lives in Indonesia

Kemp’s October 2024 note said Indonesia’s recent social growth was “largely thanks to a surge in the use of TikTok.” ByteDance’s planning tools put ad reach at more than 165 million people aged 18 and over in a nation of 284 million, which the analysis treated as more than 82 percent of Indonesian adults.

He added a caveat that applies to every major app and matters more in a young market: people under 18 can tick an older age, and there is no clean way to size that distortion. By late 2025 the same class of figure, again from TikTok’s ad tools, was 180 million adults. The crown did not move.

GWI found social platforms already taking 44.3 percent of Indonesian internet users’ time online in that 2024 wave, and the country led the world on seeking out brands in social apps (63.9 percent, against 49.3 percent globally). 65.2 percent used social networks to research a possible buy. In the Philippines, daily social time in the same snapshot was 3 hours and 33 minutes across 8.2 platforms a month. Thailand’s YouTube Android users sat on the service for 46 hours and 25 minutes a month, against a global 29 hours and 21 minutes.

data.ai’s worldwide numbers explain why agencies chase those minutes. Average TikTok time on Android was more than double Instagram’s 16 hours and 49 minutes, and each TikTok session ran 5 minutes and 58 seconds against 2 minutes and 53 seconds. Third-party user counts still had Instagram about 50 percent ahead, even as TikTok’s own 18-plus ad reach (1.690 billion) nosed past Instagram’s 13-plus figure (1.688 billion). Reach and time are different products. Southeast Asia was selling both.

More Than Half Research a Purchase on Social

The October file’s other quiet shift was where people look before they spend. More than half of adult internet users in South-East Asia said they use social networks to research potential purchases, a pattern GWI also recorded across Latin America. Africa printed even higher shares, with Nigeria and Ghana above 87 percent.

Women used social research more than men, and younger users more than older ones, but more than 1 in 3 people aged 55 to 64 still said they turned to those apps when they were weighing a buy. Instagram users aged 16 and above, in the same quarter’s global cut, used the app to follow or research brands at a 62.3 percent rate.

That is a straight problem for search ads and a gift for anyone who can hold a live cart next to a video. It is also why a trade ministry might decide that a social app with a pay button is no longer just a social app.

Why Jakarta Put TikTok on a Leash

Indonesia did not wait for a white paper. Ministry of Trade Regulation 31/2023, issued in late September 2023, treated “social commerce” as a social operator that lets merchants offer goods, and it blocked those operators from running the payment themselves. TikTok Shop’s in-app checkout in Indonesia went dark in October 2023.

ByteDance then agreed in December 2023 to buy about 75 percent of GoTo’s Tokopedia for about US$1.5 billion, and the deal closed in early 2024. Shop came back as a separate commerce company, with Tokopedia’s branding on the tab inside the TikTok app. The audience never had to leave. The license, on paper, did.

The next turns were about data and age, not baskets. After protests in late August 2025, the communications ministry froze TikTok’s local electronic-system licence on 3 October 2025, saying the company had not handed over complete Live activity. Director General Alexander Sabar said the government wanted traffic and monetization records from 25 to 30 August, including streams tied to online gambling. On 5 October he said the data had arrived and the licence was on again.

INDONESIA’S TIKTOK RULES, 2023 TO 2026

1. Late September 2023: Ministry of Trade Regulation 31/2023 bars social platforms from handling payments on in-app shops.
2. October 2023: TikTok Shop’s in-app checkout in Indonesia goes offline.
3. December 2023: ByteDance agrees to buy about 75 percent of Tokopedia for about US$1.5 billion; the deal closes in early 2024 and Shop returns through a separate company.
4. 3 October 2025: The communications ministry suspends TikTok’s local licence over incomplete Live data from protests on 25 to 30 August 2025.
5. 5 October 2025: The licence is restored after TikTok submits Live traffic and monetization records.
6. 6 March 2026: Communication and Digital Affairs Minister Meutya Hafid says children under 16 will lose accounts on listed high-risk platforms.
7. 28 March 2026: Enforcement of the under-16 rule begins, covering TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, X, Bigo Live, and Roblox.
8. June 2026: TikTok closes 4.1 million Indonesian accounts and YouTube about 600,000, a combined 4.7 million, to meet the age rule.

Hafid’s brief for the age cutoff was addiction as much as porn, fraud, or bullying. Australia had already enforced a similar under-16 bar in December 2025. Indonesia was first in Southeast Asia.

The basis is clear. Our children face increasingly real threats. From exposure to pornography, cyberbullying, online fraud, and most importantly addiction. The government is here so that parents no longer have to fight alone against the giant of algorithms.

Meutya Hafid, Indonesia communication and digital affairs minister

The 2023 checkout blackout still sits in local memory as live sellers losing a till overnight. The 2026 age cut is the same instinct aimed at a younger cohort. Adult reach, meanwhile, kept printing record figures. That is the split the 2024 snapshot did not advertise: the habit was valuable enough to regulate, and valuable enough to keep.

Digital 2026 Still Shows a Heavy Scroll

We Are Social and Meltwater’s Digital 2026 country files, built on late 2025 data, did not show a region that had logged off. Kepios’s internet users counted for Vietnam in 2026 sit beside a much larger Indonesian online public in the same series.

VIETNAM AND INDONESIA IN THE DIGITAL 2026 FILES

Vietnam’s file also logged 79.0 million social identities (77.6 percent of the population) and TikTok ad reach of 76.1 million people 18 and over. Indonesia’s internet base was 230 million, up 18 million from October 2024, with 331 million mobile connections. Ookla’s median mobile download was 152.17 Mbps in Vietnam and 45.01 Mbps in Indonesia, a reminder that the scroll is not the same speed in both markets.

Kepios put 180 million social media user identities in Indonesia in October 2025, equal to 62.9 percent of the population and up 26 percent year on year. That total matches TikTok’s late-2025 adult ad reach of 180 million. DataReportal’s own method note says a country’s social-identity figure may rest on the single largest local platform, so the rhyme is a warning label, not a coincidence to ignore.

We Are Social Indonesia’s read of the same Digital 2026 Indonesia social media time on TikTok file is the time budget. People there spent 21 hours and 50 minutes per week on social media, including online video, across 7.7 platforms a month. WhatsApp was the most used and most loved app, with nine in ten people active each month. On Android, TikTok took 1 hour and 53 minutes a day and WhatsApp 1 hour and 52 minutes. YouTube held the longest session at 16 minutes and 49 seconds, with SnackVideo at 15 minutes and 4 seconds.

Search engines still led brand discovery at 38.3 percent, with social ads at 37.3 percent and comments at 32.6 percent. Three in five Indonesians used social media as their main channel for researching brands. More than a third used ChatGPT each month. Estimated ad spend for 2025 was US$6.97 billion, up 5.3 percent. The audience the 2024 snapshot promised was still showing up, and still getting priced.

A 75 Percent Stake Kept Checkout Alive

The structural fix of 2023 and 2024 did what the engagement charts implied it would do. Shop did not have to win a new public. It had to survive as a licensed neighbour of the feed that already owned the evening.

That bargain did not land as a local jobs story. In July 2026, after reports that Tokopedia’s remaining tech work was being thinned out, Jakarta’s tech community treated the merger as talent leaving for ByteDance teams abroad, and lawmakers talked about calling the company in. The claim about headcount lives in that argument, not in a filing. The political fact is simpler: a platform that holds 180 million adult users can buy its way around a checkout ban and still be summoned over data, children, and payroll.

Vietnam’s path stayed closer to in-app commerce and a public that already paid for digital goods at a 74.1 percent monthly clip in 2024. Indonesia’s path is the one other capitals have been watching, a split between the video and the till, with the age gate stacked on top. The October 2024 charts said Southeast Asia would not put the phone down. The years that followed said the state would not pretend that was only a media plan.

Adults in Indonesia are still on TikTok in numbers no other country matches. The bag, the kids’ accounts, and the Live logs are no longer unsupervised extras in that deal.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why do Indonesia’s social user totals match TikTok’s ad reach?

Kepios, which builds the Digital 2026 country totals, says it tries to de-duplicate people across apps but cannot always do so, and that a national “social media user identities” figure may rest on the single largest local platform. In Indonesia in October 2025 that figure was 180 million, the same as TikTok’s 18-plus ad reach, so the social total should be read as an identity count, not a census of unique humans.

How many people were still offline in October 2024?

The October 2024 snapshot counted 2.66 billion people still offline, even after 151 million new internet users in a year, a pace Kepios put at 4.8 people coming online every second. Vietnam’s 2026 file still had 16.1 million residents offline (15.9 percent); Indonesia’s had 55.8 million (19.5 percent).

Does Instagram still have more users than TikTok worldwide?

Yes on third-party user counts in that October 2024 analysis. data.ai’s app figures and GWI’s surveys both put Instagram about 50 percent ahead of TikTok in people, even as TikTok’s 18-plus ad reach of 1.690 billion edged past Instagram’s 13-plus ad reach of 1.688 billion, and even as TikTok collected more total time.

What share of Vietnamese adults can TikTok ads reach?

TikTok’s ad tools in late 2025 implied reach equal to 102.9 percent of adults aged 18 and over in Vietnam, and 88.8 percent of the local internet user base. A figure above 100 percent of adults is a flag for duplicate accounts and age misstatements, the same caution Kemp attached to Indonesia’s 2024 TikTok numbers.

How much of Indonesia’s 2025 ad spend was digital?

We Are Social Indonesia put digital channels at 52 percent of the US$6.97 billion 2025 ad total, or US$3.64 billion, up 8 percent. Social ads were the fastest slice at plus 11.3 percent, and influencer campaigns rose 14.4 percent, which tracks a market where three in five people already treat social apps as their main brand-research channel.