Thai Internet freedom gets thumbs down

Following the unsatisfactory ranking, the Thai Netizen Network yesterday issued a statement encouraging the public to keep a check on the government and urged authorities to stop using the lese majeste law, defamation law and Computer Crimes Act to suppress its opponents online.

Freedom House, an independent American watchdog on global freedom, recently released this year’s rankings regarding Internet freedom. Thailand was rated “not free”, because of more frequent and tougher efforts by the government to control distribution of information on the Internet, it said. 

Thai Netizen Network coordinator Arthit Suriyawongkul said this year’s evaluation of violations against Internet user rights in Thailand was very disappointing. Thailand scored 32 points on the Freedom House index, with the worst score being 40. This resulted in an overall Internet freedom rating of 63, from the lowest rating of 100.

“This is the fifth year that Freedom House has studied our Internet freedom. In 2013, our ranking went up to ‘partly free’, then after the coup last year, for two years in a row we’ve been in the bottom category,” Arthit said.

The report stated that this year, the National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO) had summoned more than 400 people for interrogation on their online activities. Those summoned were frequently asked to divulge their social media account password to officers as a condition for their release.

It also reported that the Military Court had given the longest prison term on record for online violation of the lese majeste law. Pongsak Sriboonpeng was sentenced to 60 years in jail for a lese majeste offence, commuted to 30 years, while Sasivimol, a 29-year-old woman who only uses one name, was sentenced to 56 years in prison, commuted to 28 years.

“In recent months, the junta has been trying to use the computer crime law to threaten the public or even journalists’ scrutiny of the government,” Arthit stated. “I insist that the use of Section 14 of the Computer Crimes Act to file a defamation case is wrong and against the original intention of the law, which was designed to be a tool to prevent online fraud,” he added.

The statement also highlighted that “liking” defamatory content could not be deemed as dissemination or support for content, hence “liking” content on social networks was not a crime. 

The report said that not only was the government using the law to discourage online political activities and curb freedom of expression, but the NCPO had tried to censor online materials and banned many websites, including those of the UK’s Daily Mail newspaper and Enlightened Jurists’ (Nitirat).

The report also raised concerns about the government’s intention in establishing a single Internet gateway to control the flow of information from abroad.