Matt Crook – who runs the “inadvertently offensive” Lost Boy blog – has recently removed a comment from his site because of pressure from the Thai Ministry of Information and Communication Technology.
He writes:
The post itself was was only two days old, which shows you just how vigorously the Internet is monitored. It was my fault for letting the comment slip through. There are certain subjects that just cannot be addressed without serious repercussions.
If the MICT had called me out on any other topic then it would be another issue, but this is one thing that has to be respected, regardless of what people’s opinions are.
Has anyone else ever been contacted by the MICT about the content of a blog post?
His report of this incident has generated a number of incredulous comments from readers who doubt that the government is watching his site that closely. It generally steers well clear of some of the controversial material that, say, a New Mandala is happy to host.
Interested readers will find the original, “offending” post here (but with all the comments deleted).
What do New Mandala readers think? Was this call from the Ministry just a well-executed hoax? Or is there really some part of the Thai bureaucracy encouraging webmasters to delete “offensive” comments about royal wardrobes? And with such speed and efficiency?
5 responses so far ↓
1 Grasshopper // Nov 15, 2007 at 10:23 pm
Could be his colleague didn’t like what was written so they told him to take it down under the guise of an order from MICT so as not to offend.
Although it wouldn’t surprise me that they have his site and its comments as a rss feed. Maybe MICT are l337 d00ds too? Blogs are after all a fairly good indicator of public opinion. For instance, even Lee Hsien Loong admitted to reading popular Singapore blogger mrbrown in his national day speech of 2006.. Why wouldn’t there be some sort of effort to control the King’s image – especially given the recent youtube debacle?
2 Johpa // Nov 18, 2007 at 10:52 am
I am not surprised at all that the Thai government continues to monitor the Internet to this extent. Many years ago, at least a decade ago, on the old soc.culture.thai newsgroup, I once posted a speculative p0st regarding the nationalistic identity of the Isaan folks (Lao vs Thai) and received an e-mail that could only be construed as a government position paper vehemently rejecting any notion that the folks in Isaan could ever construct for themselves a Lao identity. The letter was not your typical public posting and it scared this anonymous poster off that newsgroup for several weeks. One can also see this trepidation over at thaivisa where any hints of reference to His Majesty, apart from government announcements, are quickly canceled and the posters who make the mistake twice are quick to lose their right to post.
3 Farang Ky Ay // Nov 20, 2007 at 5:16 am
Hi,
I suppose one of his new friends (let me guess, a real estate lady?) made a phonecall to the service in charge … or maybe Grasshopper ’s guess is right?
Actually I think a lot of webboards and sites tackling political issues such as pantip or midnight university are regularly surveyed … They use webcrawlers based on keywords designed to flag the websites to be checked. Otherwise why would they have passed the cyber-crime act?
But I wouldn’t say Lost boy play in the same field (no offence meant, Matt posts its opinion on political issues sometimes).
PS . excuse my English
4 Matt // Nov 23, 2007 at 9:54 pm
Maybe we’ll never know. It’s interesting to note, however, that everybody seems to think they know how the MICT functions. What are people basing these theories on?
5 New Mandala and the Top 100 Thailand blogs // Jul 18, 2008 at 9:58 pm
[...] by voting for their favourites. It’s all a bit of good fun, and is another reason to check out The Lost Boy — run by Phuket-based journalist, Matt [...]
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