Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio.

I'm your host, Jason Palmer.

Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

Nicaragua's presidential election isn't until November, but what will shape it has been happening

over the past week. President Daniel Ortega's challengers are being arrested on trumped-up charges,

and the international community is at last weighing in. And in Jordan, roaming vendors selling natural gas cylinders

advertise their approach in an unusual and noisy way.

We take a listen to the ubiquitous gas truck jingles.

First up, though, across Southeast Asia, governments are finding new uses for age-old laws on treason, blasphemy, and sedition, to keep their critics quiet online. Leaders in Singapore, Malaysia, Myanmar, and Cambodia are imposing novel regulations

or cutting off internet access entirely.

Now Indonesia has joined the trend.

New legislation orders online platforms to remove so-called prohibited content from

their sites within as little as four hours of it going up. Companies had until last week to comply,

though that deadline has now been extended by six months. How, or indeed whether content providers

follow the law could set a standard for online censorship across Asia.

Indonesia is Southeast Asia's biggest, most robust democracy.

It might have been expected to buck this trend towards digital censorship.

Charlie McCann is the economist's Southeast Asia correspondent and is based in Singapore.

But instead, the country is succumbing to kind of knee-jerk authoritarianism, as are many of its

neighbors. So that's really worrying for the whole region. And tell me a bit about this new law in

Indonesia. What exactly does it stipulate? Well, it's called

ministerial regulation number five, or MR5 for short. So the government is really worried

...