Things are starting to get ridiculous. Thailand has always had some of the harshest and most outdated media laws but now the country just took another giant leap back into the Dark Ages!
AFP Photo / Tang Chhin Sothy
Apparently, according to RT.com, fifteen years behind bars is the price you could pay for “liking”
some Facebook pages in Thailand, and this is just
part of a global trend as Big Brother’s hand is increasingly extended
to social networks.
Thailand’s information minister has warned that people “liking” or
“sharing” Facebook pages considered derogatory to the King and the royal
family will be charged with violating the country’s lèse majesté laws, a
crime punishable by up to 15 years in prison. He advised them to “unlike” the pages and to remove any comments posted or risk harsh penalties, The Bangkok Post reports.
Thailand
is notorious for strictly enforcing its laws protecting the dignity of
the sovereign, regardless of the perpetrator’s nationality. In 2007, a
Swiss man was arrested and sentenced to 10 years in prison for
spray-painting posters with the King’s image. Luckily for him, the
subject of his portraits pardoned him after four months.
In
2009, an Australian writer was sentenced to three years in prison for
writing a novel which contained a passage considered offensive to the
royal family. Once again, he got lucky after the King pardoned him too.
The
Thai authorities are now turning their attention to cyberspace in the
quest to clamp down on offenders. This year, US citizen Joe Gordon was
arrested for posting excerpts from a banned biography of the King on his
website and is currently waiting for the court’s ruling after he
pleaded guilty to insulting the royal family.
Although all these
episodes portray a quirky but harmless national law, the reality is that
nobody is immune from being arrested for their internet activities,
even (and perhaps especially) in the Western world.
The British
police arrested some Facebook users for allegedly inciting disorder,
looting and burglary during this summer’s riots in the country. They
were eventually sentenced to four years in prison.
In the United States, six teenage girls were detained after they used
Facebook to send invitations to participate in a so-called “Attack a
Teacher Day.” The punishments they received were not as severe, however:
they were released into the custody of their parents and were suspended
from school for several days.
Although prosecuting people for
their online activities is nothing new, the number of activities that
could get you in jail has been on the rise. And although Thailand
has its own eccentric legislation regarding freedom of speech, there is
also an alarming trend in the West: the internet, once a bastion of
free speech, is now monitored by the authorities who seek to interpret
what they read as evidence of a crime.
When will these governments ever learn that the more you try to suppress people's opinions, the more you close off their society, the more you inadvertently invite people to express themselves in other ways, and such ways are not always friendly and convivial. As William Blake famously said, "Better to murder an infant in its cradle than nurse an unacted desire." Amen brother!
