Here at New Mandala we have not yet sought to tweet up a storm. These days every New Mandala post is automatically sent to our couple of thousand followers (@newmandala), and we also make occasional tweets on other topics. As a vehicle for sharing information in a crisis or at other times of furious activity Twitter is, of course, hard to beat. I think that is why so many governments find it so uniquely threatening.
Today the new home of regional political, social and economic commentary, the refreshed website of our Australian National University College of Asia and the Pacific, has published an analysis of Thailand’s effort to clampdown on Twitter.
As ANU PhD candidate Sarah Logan argues in a piece titled “Word cage: Thailand, Twitter and censorship”:
Thailand was the first state to publically endorse Twitter’s recently announced censorship policy. The policy essentially allows governments with a ‘valid and applicable legal order’ to ask Twitter to remove certain tweets because they violate local laws. Doing so would mean that while those tweets were still visible by users outside that country, users within it could not see them, thus defusing any domestic impact. Managing social media is an ongoing concern for many states, and fellow Twitterphobes like China and Russia were quick to follow Thailand’s example. Thailand’s support for the policy comes as no surprise: it is part of increasing crackdowns on freedom of expression online by states from Thailand to India, Russia and South Africa.
You can read her full analysis here. It is well worth a look for those intrigued by the direction of government efforts to control online content. Clearly this will be a big issue for countries like Thailand in the decade ahead.
I raised this before when New Mandela and others ran the “Thailand started twitter censorship” story.
The first major democracy that called for twitter banning, blocking and censorship was the UK during the riots of August 2011.
http://www.metro.co.uk/tech/872080-uk-riots-david-cameron-hints-at-social-media-shutdown
Talks ensued between the UK and twitter at that time and it is very likely that twitter’s censorship policy was as a result of those discussions which Thailand then adopted.
Also anyone who thinks Twitter is anything other than a private company seeking to make profits are delusional.
What is far more interesting is that social interactions are now being commodified and commercialised by the likes of Twitter, Facebook etc not that some “cyber evangelists” feel let down by the private companies who are colonising social space.
I’d suggest anyone who believes that things like “twitter” are bringers of “freedoms” read Evgeny Morozov’s illuminating study of all that is cyber “The Net Delusion”.
Finally, more resistance to the dominant order in Thailand has been distributed by VCD’s amongst the ordinary folk of the North and Northeast (many of whom don’t know and don’t care about “social media”) than twitter to multiplies of hundreds. The latter tends to be the preserve of middle class Bangkokians pushing a very Yellow-tinged agenda.
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Here, also, is something Morozov wrote for the Foreign Policy magazine/website back in 2009 about the Songkran Uprising in Bangkok that year.
http://neteffect.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/04/17/technologys_dubious_role_in_thailands_protests
He raises the issue that at that time Twitter was dominated by PAD supporters who were spinning the story a certain way.
It mentions my intervention when I correctly pointed out to the assembled newsrooms around the world that the PAD tweeple were not entirely credible – they were trying to pass off ASTV as a bonafide news source.
Of course, at that time, there was absolutely no UDD representation on twitter at all and those who took a different line to the PAD-line soon got cyber-stalked, hate campaigned etc.
Things like the Facebook-based Social Sanctions group – something that has been far more effective at censoring debate in Thailand than any proposed curtailment of twitter – never seem to get mentioned that much by Western media, academics etc.
Is that because the existence of such groups undo the false-narrative that seems to have accumulated around things like twitter, Facebook etc?
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Hi Andrew – thanks to you and the New Mandala crew for reading and responding to the the piece I wrote. I thought I might take the opportunity to continue the discussion with an engaged audience!
I agree that the twitter debate is overblown, and that the Western media/academia approach is often hyperbolic at best.
However, the point is not necessarily a cyber realist/cyber utopioan Morozov/Shirky style debate. True, the UK government discussed twitter censorship long before the policy came out – and I think you are right to point out the link between those discussions and the final policy outcome.
However, one of the interesting things about the Thai policy is not the actual (debatable) affect Twitter has on Thai politics. Instead, what is interesting is that the government felt compelled to respond quickly and so publically – you’ll note the UK did no such thing. This kind of ‘performative policy’ surrounding online censorship is increasingly interesting. This is a link to a useful article about this sort of thing in Uzbekistan: http://registan.net/index.php/2012/02/21/why-did-uzbekistan-ban-wikipedia/
I like to think of it as ‘data style as soft power’….as well as, of course, hard power. This is interesting in the Thai case given recent crackdowns on all forms of free speech – not just online. There are lots of other examples of this sort of thing, and I hope to write a post about it soon.
On your point about VCDs and the Bangkok middle class educated elite’s preoccupation with twitter – I agree with you completely. Cyber utopians tend to forget that people have long communicated about politics effectively without the internet, and continue to do so. However, what is interesting s not the mistaken argument that twitter is the most important form of this sort of communication – although it is obviously important enough for the government to worry about it.
Instead, what is interesting, as you point out, is the link between a corporate policy and contested domestic politics, and the way the corporate policy can shape those politics, inadvertently or otherwise. I’d love to know more about the social spaces facebook group you mentioned, and am off to look it up now.
Thanks,
Sarah.
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Sarah
Thanks for your comment.
In my view, Thailand offers one of the most successful examples of reactionary forces co-opting social media in order to wage hate-campaigns and intimidate the opposition. In many ways the representatives of Thai fascism have been more effective at utilising social media than those of a more progressive bent.
It is also interesting that Facebook, despite pages like Social Sanctions and “I love to see Red Shirt corpses” (was in Thai – not sure it exists anymore), have become the medium of choice for the more progressive/democratic element, rather than twitter. Anecdotally this seems to be because FB has some element of safety and accountability while twitter has none at all.
In regards to Social Sanctions – you may have heard of the story of the Thai student, Kantoop, who received a police summons for lese majeste – this summons was never completed with the case being postponed indefinitely.
The real story of Kantoop is that she was stalked relentlessly since May 2010 by Social Sanctions. This was going on since she was 17, with threats, abuse, her address, photos etc being posted.
Speak to Thai HR activists – they are almost as frightened of the “social sanctions” (not just the group itself but also the wider use of these sanctions) as they are of legal sanctions when it comes to discussing things that are deemed off-limits.
And given the “social” aspect of “social media” – and all the usual “group-think” and conformist ways of interacting that can develop in social spaces – social media can, at its worst, transform into a very potent form of social control.
In such a scenario, then, legal devices, such as Thailand’s LM laws, are just the ultimate sanctions in a diverse and complex web of powerful forms of censorship. They represent a form of state violence every bit as explicit as a bullet to the head.
Twitter’s “censorship” strategies are, in my opinion, relatively minor in this context.
But you’re right as well. Why did the Thai government need to jump on this so quick? Maybe, if they’d had the cunning and devious spite of the Eton-educated UK PM Cameron, they’d have kept in quiet until it was necessary?
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