BANGKOK — The digital economy minister on Thursday filed a cybercrime complaint against Facebook and other social media platforms for their failure to comply with the censorship order from the Thai government.
Nearly a month after the ministry threatened to sue the American social media giants for ignoring requests to remove contents deemed defamatory to the monarchy, minister Puttipong Punnakan lodged his complaint today to the Technology Crime Suppression Division against Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram.
“This is the first time that we are taking action against service providers,” Puttipong saud. “We will sue their parent companies, which police will use Thai law since the crime took place in Thailand.”
According to the law, administrators are required to comply with the court order within 15 days, or face a maximum fine of 500,000 baht plus a daily fine of 5,000 baht per day. Puttipong said he had given time for the platforms to comply with the shutdown order since April, to which only some of the links had been taken down.
“They already received warning letters, but they didn’t fully comply with our requests,” Puttipong said. “There are 661 URLs for Facebook, but only 225 of them were taken down.”
He also accused five individuals, three of them protest leaders, of insulting the monarchy on their social media accounts in today’s complaint, though he said that only charges under the Computer Crime Act were pressed against them.
He did not explicitly mention any names during today’s press conference.
Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram have not issued any response to the complaint as of publication.
