Law Enforcement Against Criminal Acts of Intimidation Through Social Media

Abstract

Threats through social media have developed into a cybercrime phenomenon that has a serious psychological impact on victims while presenting complex challenges for Indonesia's criminal law enforcement system. This study aims to analyze two main issues: first, how the normative construction of the crime of intimidation in Indonesian criminal law regulates acts committed through social media; and second, how law enforcement is carried out in practice and the structural obstacles faced. The research uses normative legal methods with a statutory and conceptual approach, sourced from primary legal materials in the form of laws and regulations, especially Law Number 1 of 2023 concerning the new Criminal Code, the ITE Law and its amendments, and selected jurisprudence, as well as secondary legal materials in the form of up-to-date academic literature. The results of the study show that Indonesia's normative framework contains layers of regulations that overlap between the threat offenses in the Criminal Code and Article 29 of the ITE Law, resulting in uncertainty in determining the basis for appropriate prosecution. Meanwhile, law enforcement faces multiple obstacles ranging from the complexity of forensic digital, the anonymity of perpetrators, limited coordination with foreign digital platforms, to the disparity of court decisions that reflect the absence of uniform criminal guidelines. This research emphasizes the urgency of regulatory reform that clearly separates conventional threats from digital threats, accompanied by measurable law enforcement guidelines and more substantial victim protection.