PROFESSION OR PROMOTION? DIGITAL PROFESSIONALISM AND THE ETHICS OF DENTAL ADVERTISING ON SOCIAL MEDIA IN INDONESIA: A NARRATIVE REVIEW

Social media has reshaped how dentists present themselves to the public, unsettling the long-standing professional boundary between legitimate information and commercial promotion. This narrative review examines the ethics of dental advertising and digital professionalism among Indonesian dentists, asking whether that boundary is being renegotiated and whether existing ethical and regulatory frameworks are adequate to govern it. Drawing on international scholarship, Indonesian empirical studies, primary legal instruments, and comparative regulatory guidance, it advances three arguments. First, the professional prohibition on advertising was dismantled not because its ethical rationale was refuted but because it was recast in the vocabulary of competition law, leaving a harm-based residue in which promotion is presumptively permitted. Second, the unstable information-versus-promotion binary should be replaced by a five-part continuum of professional communication and a functional-plus-autonomy test, under which the decisive question is not whether a message is advertising but whether it serves or subverts the audience's capacity to appraise need, risk, and cost. Third, Indonesia's difficulty is not regulatory absence but incoherent, overlapping, and largely unenforced regulation, aggravated by a 2023 statutory reform that redistributed disciplinary authority without clearly assigning responsibility for digital conduct. Distinctive national features, including an aesthetic reframing of dentistry, an unlicensed shadow market, and a substantial unmet burden of oral disease, intensify both the promise and the peril of dental social media. The review concludes that the profession needs not a retreat from the platform but a coherent, context-calibrated, and actively enforced standard, and it offers targeted recommendations for practitioners, the professional body, educators, and regulators, together with an empirical research agenda.