Thailand threatens Facebook after videos emerge of king wearing crop top wandering in shopping mall
Thai authorities are threatening to prosecute Facebook if it doesn't remove footage of their king, Maha Vajiralongkorn, sporting a crop top and tattoos, in a test of Thailand's censorship laws.
The 44-second clip of King Maha Vajiralongkorn appears to show the 64-year-old walking with a woman throughout a shopping center in Munich, Germany, in 2016, and has since been widely shared across the social platform.
A Facebook post that features the video, which accrued nearly 458,000 views since its initial upload in April, is now inaccessible to users in Thailand.
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Takorn Tantasith, secretary general of Thailand's National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission, announced last Tuesday that the government found 131 Facebook pages accessible to the public that violated computer crimes or lèse-majesté laws.
Tantasith said the government obtained a court order to block 34 of the targeted pages and is planning to do the same with those remaining.
Authorities have threatened to press charges against the social media outlet.
"If even a single illicit page remains, we will immediately discuss what legal steps to take against Facebook Thailand," Tantasith announced last Thursday.
According to The Bangkok Post, the legal action would be the first against the social media mammoth and its partners.
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Two weeks ago, members of the Thai Internet Service Provider Association emailed Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to request the posts be blocked containing content deemed illegal in Thailand.
The country's strict laws make sharing material insulting to the monarchy punishable up to 15 years.
Over a hundred people have been detained by police under the country's strict free speech laws since, 2014, according to the Worldwide Movement for Human Rights.
"In less than three years, the military junta has generated a surge in the number of political prisoners detained under lèse-majesté by abusing a draconian law that is inconsistent with Thailand's international obligations," Dimitris Christopoulos, president of the organization, said.
