> The (pro democracy) protesters were met with severe repression, and in November 2020, Prime Minister Prayuth ordered authorities to bring back the enforcement of lèse-majesté, or Section 112 of the Criminal Code, which criminalizes “insulting the monarchy”. Thailand’s use of lèse-majesté has been both arbitrary and prolific; protesters can be arrested for as little as sharing social media posts that are ‘insulting to the monarchy’. Furthermore, the weaponization of lèse-majesté has devastating consequences: those convicted under Section 112 face three to 15 years in prison per count.
Absurd and not at all surprising today. And large sections of many populations do not care because their ideology aligns with whoever is doing the abuse of basic freedoms.
I was born in Thailand--though to be clear, I am not Thai. Thais are not Westerners. They revere their king. Their "ideology" doesn't embrace western "freedoms" of speech and protest to begin with. So the implied accusation of hypocrisy in your comment is simply misplaced.
Westerners generally, and Americans specifically, don't realize how their constant harping on "basic freedoms" comes across as ethnocentric. My parents are American citizens, but they were raised in Bangladesh and they don't really believe in free speech or democracy. My dad always talks about free speech with implicit scare quotes, like he’s referring to an american custom.
Free speech is not an American thing, it's a human thing. The fact that some governments do not recognize it does not make it any less of a right.
Rights are not given to you by your government, your rights are your rights by virtue of you being a human being.
Thinking freedom of speech is even remotely ethnocentric just proves that something is broken in that person's head that they don't even understand the basic concept.
It's not their cultural inheritance. Their moms never pulled them aside as children and said something like "you don't have to like what Bobby said to you, it's a free country and he can speak his mind." Quite the opposite: as in most Asian societies, there is an overarching emphasis on social harmony, face saving, etc.
As to democracy, that is both culturally alien to them and their experience with it has been one of failure. We have never had a stable democratic government in Bangladesh, and my parents are persuaded that it's not possible. In general, they view democracy experiments outside Europe as something of a cruel joke. My parents felt quite vindicated that democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan failed, because they expected that to happen.
> Quite the opposite: as in most Asian societies, there is an overarching emphasis on social harmony, face saving, etc.
to be fair, it's not actually different. in both cases, the more powerful person gets to say what they want and everybody else has to agree or remain quiet.
in America, you can get targeted by the state for peaceful protests or posting something on social media in the past because you're a "homegrown terrorist". in Thailand, as described here, you can get arrested for peaceful protest or something you posted in the past.
freedom has always meant freedom of the rich and powerful.
> Thais are not Westerners. They revere their king
They revere Bhumibol, not his philandering, mercurial, and ripped son Vajiralongkorn who is de facto in exile in Germany. Everything in Thailand is de facto run by the military junta and aligned oligarchs like the Chearavanont and Shinawatra families.
And the younger generation (Gen Z) doesn't have much affinity for Bhumibol either, because they grew up in the midst of a middle income trap - their lives are better than their neighbors in Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, or Vietnam, but CoL and the employment market is hellish, oligarchy and relations matter so if you didn't attend the right schools you're screwed, and abuses of power like the RedBull Heir running over a cop and all the extravagance around the royal family and their extended retinue grew more unpopular.
Tbf, I'm assume your frame of reference was the 1990s, and until the Asian Financial Crisis in 1997 Thailand went through a massive financial boom so satisfaction with Bhumibol was high. Bhumibol also at least tried to appear like he cared about normal Thai people.
> I was born in Thailand--though to be clear, I am not Thai
If you don't mind me asking, why did your parents go to Thailand instead of Malaysia or Singapore back then? As a Desi I would have assumed Malaysia or SG would have been easier back then.
My parents lived there in the 1980s and we visited regularly in the 1990s, so yes, our perception is anchored in what was generally an optimistic time for the country. It's been sad to see what's happened recently. Thais are incredible people and don't understand why they can't seem to keep a functioning civil government lately. Maybe middle income trap is the explanation.
> Thais are incredible people and don't understand why they can't seem to keep a functioning civil government lately. Maybe middle income trap is the explanation
Imo, it's the other way around. Thailand wasn't able to build strong institutions as that would have meant devolving power from the Military, Monarchy, and Crony Capitalists. This meant that economic reforms that would have helped Thailand recover from 1997 were not enacted as they would have undermined a lot of well connected and powerful people.
South Korea was roughly comparable to Thailand in the 1990s (and one of my professors who worked on Korean democratization confirmed this back in the day), but the IMF and US forced Korea to enact harsh reforms that helped them recover by the 2000s.
Also, a number of Thai business families were ethnic Chinese with ancestry in Guangdong, so a number of those families like the Chearavanonts decided to invest in China (the first privately owned companies in China were all Chearavanont funded because they had familial relations with the post-Mao leadership in Guangdong) instead of in domestic R&D, while Korean chaebols didn't have a similar option and preemptively began investing in R&D in the 1990s.
Exactly. In New Zealand I got a visit from the police because of something I said on social media. It wasn't an offence, it just made them suspicious so they questioned me then went away. But some western countries are even worse and do imprison people for quite long sentences (sometime years) for saying politically wrong ideas on social media - UK is most notorious for this but it's well supported by the population who mostly just wants to punish anyone who disagrees with their politics.
<< imprison people for quite long sentences (sometime years) for saying politically wrong ideas
It is weird even on a pragmatic basis. I accept as a concept that it may have been effective when we were a little less connected, but these days it seems like it is actively asking for a wrong kind of reaction from the population. Not to mention, the people you imprison for typing the wrong stuff online are likely now going to be way more radicalized than when they went there. Honestly, I just do not get that approach.
>are likely now going to be way more radicalized than
The problem here is you're not thinking like a state and you think this is a bad thing.
When you have some radicals out there causing problems that's an excuse for you to spend billion making your military industrial complex buddies rich. It gives you an excuse to crack down and take out anyone you like because they "are the radical enemy that's dangerous". And Western governments and companies will gladly sell you weapons and technology to monitor and blow up anyone under your rule that you want.
It is possible I mistunderstood GP, but I thought he mentioned UK, which is the embodiment of western government and, historically speaking, some of its source. It is possible things will degrade further, but it is admittedly difficult for me to accept the same level of learned helplessness in UK when compared to.. say.. Syria.
Can you provide an example of a single case where the UK has imprisoned people for political expression on social media?
As far as I can tell this is just far-right propaganda to disguise what actually happened -- which is the UK imprisoning people for conspiracies to burn down hotels with immigrants in them; or participating in on-going violent riots by calling for various buildings to be attacked or people to be murdered.
This speech isnt covered by free expression, and is a crime in all countries, including the US.
There are a couple of cases like this, including one about some racist remarks in liverpool -- both were overturned on appeal.
> Chambers appealed against the Crown Court decision to the High Court, which would ultimately quash the conviction.
These are absolutely trivial cases to assume that somehow the UK has suspended the free expression rights of its citizens. These amount to over-reach by the lowest courts (staffed by volunteer judges, fyi) which were corrected. That's about as good as justice is in practice.
(It's also an unaddressed issue on exactly what social media is -- people tend to assume its some private conversation, but its at least as plausible to treat it as a acts of publishing to a public environment. When those actions constitue attacks on people, the UK/Europe have typically regarded public attacks as having fewer free expression protections).
Neverthless, these cases are used by the far right online to disguise what has been action taken by the UK gov against far right quasi-terrorist groups engaged in mass violence. The UK gov is not persecuting people for free expression, they have taken action against people using social media to organise murder.
One should be careful to note where this perception of UK speech laws is coming from. It's not free speech classical liberals.
There have always been limits to free speech. Free speech has never meant you can incite violence, for example. You cannot order your goons to kill someone and then defend yourself on the basis of free speech.
The UK goes far beyond that. Merely voicing political dissent to mass immigration can get you harassed by the police if you dare to say that immigrants shouldn't be admitted if they don't speak the language or have very different values. That isn't "inciting violence" except through very tortured round-about logic which could just as well classify any political dissent as inciting violence by way of tacitly, implicitly, not actually advocating for a violent revolt. They call it "hate speech" but what it really means is that expression of some political opinions is outlawed. This makes a farce of democracy.
>Merely voicing political dissent to mass immigration can get you harassed by the police if you dare to say that immigrants shouldn't be admitted if they don't speak the language or have very different values.
Can you an example of a person who was convicted and exactly what they said?
One of the things I deeply love about British people is their orderliness. I always joke that British people will jump off a bridge if instructed to do so, as long as the paperwork is in order. Only such an orderly people would allow themselves to be treated like this for the sake of immigrants.
This is so fucked up. Can't wait for them to knock because of some misunderstood inside joke. If anyone reads my private messages, straight to jail for profanity.
Chilling. Governments weaponizing information they have on citizens is textbook dystopian. The lack of oversight on social media platforms that allows this to happen is incompetence at best, and complicity at worst.
As more governments slip into autocracies, similar scenarios are likely happening in other countries as well, and we just don't know about it. The fact that US social media platforms are operated by people supportive of an aspiring autocrat should be a red flag for anyone still using them. Especially for citizens of the US, where the line between the government and corporations gets thinner by the day.
These are truly bizarre and frightening times for anyone outside of this system.
> The lack of oversight on social media platforms that allows this to happen is incompetence at best, and complicity at worst.
The social media platforms are supposed to what? Be a foil to the governments? Replace the government? Be a foil to the governments you don't like? It's unclear what you think the ideal here is.
Your "be independent" is what I was hinting at with my "replace". The GP suggests that social networks either need to have oversight or be the oversight. You assert that they should be the oversight, but how is that not the same totalitarianism?
To keep this on topic: the GP is suggesting that Meta/X put checks on what the Thai government is able to do on their platforms. This feels like a thin appeal to some higher authority that hopefully GP agrees with more, and definitely doesn't feel like a less totalitarian approach.
Those of us who want democracy want governments to regulate companies since a government at least has the potential of becoming democratic (companies don’t).
There are many others who want them to just “enable” society—perhaps because of their own financial incentives.
TFA mentions 4 recommendations that social media platforms can implement to prevent the abuse of their users. These aren't even political, but pertain to the practice of doxxing in general.
And like a sibling comment mentioned, companies should operate separately from governments. When that separation is blurred the checks and balances that are supposed to be in place in order to keep companies from abusing people, and from being an extension for governments to do the same, are just gone. At that point the country becomes a corporatocracy, serving the interests of companies rather than citizens.
The US has arguably functioned like this for decades, but when there are literal businessmen in power this is more evident than ever before. It's how you get scenarios of presidents manipulating the economy for their and their cronies' benefit. The next step is complete authoritarianism where companies are government puppets, where the spread of and access to information is tightly controlled and sprinkled with their own propaganda in order to keep megalomaniacs in power, and where any dissidence is squashed before it has the chance to spread. This is how you get China, Russia, and any government that aspires to that formula.
It's crazy that this needs explanation, or that it's a controversial line of thought.
It’s not practical to think that companies can operate separately from governments and indeed I think they should not. We want companies to be subject to the law. That means if governments bring something like a subpoena or other court order to the company, the company should comply.
Well for jurisdictions where the government weaponizes the justice system that means the company either has to choose not to do business there or to bend the knee..
> And like a sibling comment mentioned, companies should operate separately from governments.
Unless you are making the claim that the Thai government is giving special privilege to Meta/X or vice versa, then it already is this way. Since the doxxing/bullying happened anyways, this is irrelevant.
I think we both agree that what is happening in this article is bad. You made some assertion that “lack of oversight…is incompetence at best, and complicity at worst“, so who is supposed to provide this oversight? You are clearly saying “not a government”, but I think that social networks doing this “oversight” of what governments are doing is equally dangerous.
Thai authorities can also arrest and jail you if you leave bad reviews on Google maps. If you visit Thailand it's best not to say anything but positive things about the country on social media.
Probably not a bad strategy. The people who go by Google reviews probably only visit once in a lifetime whether they like Thailand or not, so it pays to wow them with fraudulent reviews and then gouge them as much as possible while they’re in the country.
It’s not as if they’re going to leave early in the stay and go back to Europe or North America, because of the sunk cost fallacy.
I love Thailand as a country but they should relax the defamation thing. A while ago I wanted to criticize the human zoo they setup in the North but I was advised by some Thai friends to not say anything unless I want to get banned from the country.
It is interesting to examine the case of Brokedown Palace, which was set in Thailand, but filmed in the Philippines, because it was “critical of the Thai legal system”
In my country platforms that do not force users to self dox are suppressed. Much cleaner for the authorities so they don't have to tip their hand and be seen doxxing.
The bigger government gets, the less freedoms the people have. It is critically important not to ask government to solve problems (government is bad at solving most problems), and to seek ways to shrink government.
I reject the implication, that corporations are always better at solving most problems.
> and to seek ways to shrink government.
Id rather seek ways to maximize liberty, and while they frequently can mean limiting the government, the act of shrinking the government is not _necessary_, and even works against my goals if the government is the one keeping my liberty maximized
> I reject the implication, that corporations are always better at solving most problems.
If anything, businesses just turn into entities indistinguishable from governments as they grow. It would be weird if anything different happened. They're long living entities with massive populations. Should be unsurprising that they converge to similar solutions. But I think the key difference is corporations have fewer incentives to care about the general public (take what you will about government incentives to care about the public but certainly corporations have less incentives. It's much rarer for public to storm into a corporate headquarters with the intent to take it over)
Yeah, aren't most businesses kind of like dictatorships, perhaps oligarchies but employees don't have a vote anyway. It's no surprise that if Trump and Musk want to run the USA as a business it kind of looks like that.
Corporations are only long lived when protected by artificial monopolies like parents, government regulations, or too big to fail bailouts. With full competition, corporations stay lean and die regularly. That is much healthier than the oligarchies created by government interference that we have today worldwide in capitalism.
The fact that your knee jerk response was to put words in his mouth, specifically the ones you chose, and then claim you stand for liberty really casts a lot of doubt on that second part.
Nowhere did he say corporations would be doing everything. There were a whole plethora of organizations and institutions (social clubs, religious adjacent institutions, etc) that used do do a lot of the public good type stuff and have fallen by the wayside or become indistinguishable from government contractors over the past 100yr as high touch western governments have usurped and stuck their noses in their functions.
Those forms cannot really compete with the neighbouring (or even overseas) nation-states. Look no further than the history of the North America and Australia after the Europeans discovered those continents.
when it fears what I and my neighbors will do to it. When it personally thinks about its accountability to the people around it, on firstname basis, any time it even considers spending money.
> The (pro democracy) protesters were met with severe repression, and in November 2020, Prime Minister Prayuth ordered authorities to bring back the enforcement of lèse-majesté, or Section 112 of the Criminal Code, which criminalizes “insulting the monarchy”. Thailand’s use of lèse-majesté has been both arbitrary and prolific; protesters can be arrested for as little as sharing social media posts that are ‘insulting to the monarchy’. Furthermore, the weaponization of lèse-majesté has devastating consequences: those convicted under Section 112 face three to 15 years in prison per count.
Enforcement of lèse-majesté never went away but now it’s been weaponised to include criticism of the military.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/american-academic-arrested-thaila...
your linked article says nothing about criticizing the military
Absurd and not at all surprising today. And large sections of many populations do not care because their ideology aligns with whoever is doing the abuse of basic freedoms.
I was born in Thailand--though to be clear, I am not Thai. Thais are not Westerners. They revere their king. Their "ideology" doesn't embrace western "freedoms" of speech and protest to begin with. So the implied accusation of hypocrisy in your comment is simply misplaced.
Westerners generally, and Americans specifically, don't realize how their constant harping on "basic freedoms" comes across as ethnocentric. My parents are American citizens, but they were raised in Bangladesh and they don't really believe in free speech or democracy. My dad always talks about free speech with implicit scare quotes, like he’s referring to an american custom.
Free speech is not an American thing, it's a human thing. The fact that some governments do not recognize it does not make it any less of a right.
Rights are not given to you by your government, your rights are your rights by virtue of you being a human being.
Thinking freedom of speech is even remotely ethnocentric just proves that something is broken in that person's head that they don't even understand the basic concept.
Why do your parents believe this?
It's not their cultural inheritance. Their moms never pulled them aside as children and said something like "you don't have to like what Bobby said to you, it's a free country and he can speak his mind." Quite the opposite: as in most Asian societies, there is an overarching emphasis on social harmony, face saving, etc.
As to democracy, that is both culturally alien to them and their experience with it has been one of failure. We have never had a stable democratic government in Bangladesh, and my parents are persuaded that it's not possible. In general, they view democracy experiments outside Europe as something of a cruel joke. My parents felt quite vindicated that democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan failed, because they expected that to happen.
> Quite the opposite: as in most Asian societies, there is an overarching emphasis on social harmony, face saving, etc.
to be fair, it's not actually different. in both cases, the more powerful person gets to say what they want and everybody else has to agree or remain quiet.
in America, you can get targeted by the state for peaceful protests or posting something on social media in the past because you're a "homegrown terrorist". in Thailand, as described here, you can get arrested for peaceful protest or something you posted in the past.
freedom has always meant freedom of the rich and powerful.
And when a Mao or a Pol Pot comes along, he will find a defenseless culture ripe for the taking.
> Thais are not Westerners. They revere their king
They revere Bhumibol, not his philandering, mercurial, and ripped son Vajiralongkorn who is de facto in exile in Germany. Everything in Thailand is de facto run by the military junta and aligned oligarchs like the Chearavanont and Shinawatra families.
And the younger generation (Gen Z) doesn't have much affinity for Bhumibol either, because they grew up in the midst of a middle income trap - their lives are better than their neighbors in Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, or Vietnam, but CoL and the employment market is hellish, oligarchy and relations matter so if you didn't attend the right schools you're screwed, and abuses of power like the RedBull Heir running over a cop and all the extravagance around the royal family and their extended retinue grew more unpopular.
Tbf, I'm assume your frame of reference was the 1990s, and until the Asian Financial Crisis in 1997 Thailand went through a massive financial boom so satisfaction with Bhumibol was high. Bhumibol also at least tried to appear like he cared about normal Thai people.
> I was born in Thailand--though to be clear, I am not Thai
If you don't mind me asking, why did your parents go to Thailand instead of Malaysia or Singapore back then? As a Desi I would have assumed Malaysia or SG would have been easier back then.
My parents lived there in the 1980s and we visited regularly in the 1990s, so yes, our perception is anchored in what was generally an optimistic time for the country. It's been sad to see what's happened recently. Thais are incredible people and don't understand why they can't seem to keep a functioning civil government lately. Maybe middle income trap is the explanation.
> Thais are incredible people and don't understand why they can't seem to keep a functioning civil government lately. Maybe middle income trap is the explanation
Imo, it's the other way around. Thailand wasn't able to build strong institutions as that would have meant devolving power from the Military, Monarchy, and Crony Capitalists. This meant that economic reforms that would have helped Thailand recover from 1997 were not enacted as they would have undermined a lot of well connected and powerful people.
South Korea was roughly comparable to Thailand in the 1990s (and one of my professors who worked on Korean democratization confirmed this back in the day), but the IMF and US forced Korea to enact harsh reforms that helped them recover by the 2000s.
Also, a number of Thai business families were ethnic Chinese with ancestry in Guangdong, so a number of those families like the Chearavanonts decided to invest in China (the first privately owned companies in China were all Chearavanont funded because they had familial relations with the post-Mao leadership in Guangdong) instead of in domestic R&D, while Korean chaebols didn't have a similar option and preemptively began investing in R&D in the 1990s.
Exactly. In New Zealand I got a visit from the police because of something I said on social media. It wasn't an offence, it just made them suspicious so they questioned me then went away. But some western countries are even worse and do imprison people for quite long sentences (sometime years) for saying politically wrong ideas on social media - UK is most notorious for this but it's well supported by the population who mostly just wants to punish anyone who disagrees with their politics.
<< imprison people for quite long sentences (sometime years) for saying politically wrong ideas
It is weird even on a pragmatic basis. I accept as a concept that it may have been effective when we were a little less connected, but these days it seems like it is actively asking for a wrong kind of reaction from the population. Not to mention, the people you imprison for typing the wrong stuff online are likely now going to be way more radicalized than when they went there. Honestly, I just do not get that approach.
>are likely now going to be way more radicalized than
The problem here is you're not thinking like a state and you think this is a bad thing.
When you have some radicals out there causing problems that's an excuse for you to spend billion making your military industrial complex buddies rich. It gives you an excuse to crack down and take out anyone you like because they "are the radical enemy that's dangerous". And Western governments and companies will gladly sell you weapons and technology to monitor and blow up anyone under your rule that you want.
It is possible I mistunderstood GP, but I thought he mentioned UK, which is the embodiment of western government and, historically speaking, some of its source. It is possible things will degrade further, but it is admittedly difficult for me to accept the same level of learned helplessness in UK when compared to.. say.. Syria.
edit: added which; when compared to
Can you provide an example of a single case where the UK has imprisoned people for political expression on social media?
As far as I can tell this is just far-right propaganda to disguise what actually happened -- which is the UK imprisoning people for conspiracies to burn down hotels with immigrants in them; or participating in on-going violent riots by calling for various buildings to be attacked or people to be murdered.
This speech isnt covered by free expression, and is a crime in all countries, including the US.
I’m guessing this[0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_joke_trial
There are a couple of cases like this, including one about some racist remarks in liverpool -- both were overturned on appeal.
> Chambers appealed against the Crown Court decision to the High Court, which would ultimately quash the conviction.
These are absolutely trivial cases to assume that somehow the UK has suspended the free expression rights of its citizens. These amount to over-reach by the lowest courts (staffed by volunteer judges, fyi) which were corrected. That's about as good as justice is in practice.
(It's also an unaddressed issue on exactly what social media is -- people tend to assume its some private conversation, but its at least as plausible to treat it as a acts of publishing to a public environment. When those actions constitue attacks on people, the UK/Europe have typically regarded public attacks as having fewer free expression protections).
Neverthless, these cases are used by the far right online to disguise what has been action taken by the UK gov against far right quasi-terrorist groups engaged in mass violence. The UK gov is not persecuting people for free expression, they have taken action against people using social media to organise murder.
One should be careful to note where this perception of UK speech laws is coming from. It's not free speech classical liberals.
Nit: is this political? Looks like the issue with the "joke" was violence/terrorism. A political statement would be like
> David Cameron is a twit
Not
> I'm going to blow up the airport
Can't imagine why this person got jail time for that given that it was just idiocy, but still
Well - what it was, that you have said? You fully know it changes things.
Good job confirming his point.
There have always been limits to free speech. Free speech has never meant you can incite violence, for example. You cannot order your goons to kill someone and then defend yourself on the basis of free speech.
The UK goes far beyond that. Merely voicing political dissent to mass immigration can get you harassed by the police if you dare to say that immigrants shouldn't be admitted if they don't speak the language or have very different values. That isn't "inciting violence" except through very tortured round-about logic which could just as well classify any political dissent as inciting violence by way of tacitly, implicitly, not actually advocating for a violent revolt. They call it "hate speech" but what it really means is that expression of some political opinions is outlawed. This makes a farce of democracy.
>Merely voicing political dissent to mass immigration can get you harassed by the police if you dare to say that immigrants shouldn't be admitted if they don't speak the language or have very different values.
Can you an example of a person who was convicted and exactly what they said?
One of the things I deeply love about British people is their orderliness. I always joke that British people will jump off a bridge if instructed to do so, as long as the paperwork is in order. Only such an orderly people would allow themselves to be treated like this for the sake of immigrants.
This is so fucked up. Can't wait for them to knock because of some misunderstood inside joke. If anyone reads my private messages, straight to jail for profanity.
The cops visited me in Minecraft last month.
They said to be careful, because if I die in Minecraft, I die in REAL LIFE!
https://m.xkcd.com/180/
Chilling. Governments weaponizing information they have on citizens is textbook dystopian. The lack of oversight on social media platforms that allows this to happen is incompetence at best, and complicity at worst.
As more governments slip into autocracies, similar scenarios are likely happening in other countries as well, and we just don't know about it. The fact that US social media platforms are operated by people supportive of an aspiring autocrat should be a red flag for anyone still using them. Especially for citizens of the US, where the line between the government and corporations gets thinner by the day.
These are truly bizarre and frightening times for anyone outside of this system.
> The lack of oversight on social media platforms that allows this to happen is incompetence at best, and complicity at worst.
The social media platforms are supposed to what? Be a foil to the governments? Replace the government? Be a foil to the governments you don't like? It's unclear what you think the ideal here is.
Err.. be independent of governments.
The thinking of your post betrays an increasingly common totalitarian assumption behind the role of government -- perhaps covid has caused this.
In liberal democracies the government is always supposed to have only a minimal, enabling, role to civil society.
You cannot be "independent" from the government on this planet.
Your "be independent" is what I was hinting at with my "replace". The GP suggests that social networks either need to have oversight or be the oversight. You assert that they should be the oversight, but how is that not the same totalitarianism?
To keep this on topic: the GP is suggesting that Meta/X put checks on what the Thai government is able to do on their platforms. This feels like a thin appeal to some higher authority that hopefully GP agrees with more, and definitely doesn't feel like a less totalitarian approach.
> the GP is suggesting that Meta/X put checks on what the Thai government is able to do on their platforms
No, that's not at all what I'm suggesting.[1]
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43749941
>In liberal democracies the government is always supposed to have only a minimal, enabling, role to civil society.
Who actually believes this except for liberations who aren't just right wing hiding their true views.
Those of us who want democracy want governments to regulate companies since a government at least has the potential of becoming democratic (companies don’t).
There are many others who want them to just “enable” society—perhaps because of their own financial incentives.
TFA mentions 4 recommendations that social media platforms can implement to prevent the abuse of their users. These aren't even political, but pertain to the practice of doxxing in general.
And like a sibling comment mentioned, companies should operate separately from governments. When that separation is blurred the checks and balances that are supposed to be in place in order to keep companies from abusing people, and from being an extension for governments to do the same, are just gone. At that point the country becomes a corporatocracy, serving the interests of companies rather than citizens.
The US has arguably functioned like this for decades, but when there are literal businessmen in power this is more evident than ever before. It's how you get scenarios of presidents manipulating the economy for their and their cronies' benefit. The next step is complete authoritarianism where companies are government puppets, where the spread of and access to information is tightly controlled and sprinkled with their own propaganda in order to keep megalomaniacs in power, and where any dissidence is squashed before it has the chance to spread. This is how you get China, Russia, and any government that aspires to that formula.
It's crazy that this needs explanation, or that it's a controversial line of thought.
It’s not practical to think that companies can operate separately from governments and indeed I think they should not. We want companies to be subject to the law. That means if governments bring something like a subpoena or other court order to the company, the company should comply.
Well for jurisdictions where the government weaponizes the justice system that means the company either has to choose not to do business there or to bend the knee..
> And like a sibling comment mentioned, companies should operate separately from governments.
Unless you are making the claim that the Thai government is giving special privilege to Meta/X or vice versa, then it already is this way. Since the doxxing/bullying happened anyways, this is irrelevant.
I think we both agree that what is happening in this article is bad. You made some assertion that “lack of oversight…is incompetence at best, and complicity at worst“, so who is supposed to provide this oversight? You are clearly saying “not a government”, but I think that social networks doing this “oversight” of what governments are doing is equally dangerous.
The main reason to value privacy and data protection is that a liberal government cannot be guaranteed to survive.
No liberal can guarantee that they won't be replaced with a genocidal authoritarian, so systems need to be designed with that possibility in mind.
Something as "innocent" as a census can be weaponized by a future authoritarian government.
https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/rearvision/the-dark-s...
> Chilling. Governments weaponizing information they have on citizens is textbook dystopian
Welcome to government.
Thai authorities can also arrest and jail you if you leave bad reviews on Google maps. If you visit Thailand it's best not to say anything but positive things about the country on social media.
Probably not a bad strategy. The people who go by Google reviews probably only visit once in a lifetime whether they like Thailand or not, so it pays to wow them with fraudulent reviews and then gouge them as much as possible while they’re in the country.
It’s not as if they’re going to leave early in the stay and go back to Europe or North America, because of the sunk cost fallacy.
That’s more about Thailand’s ridiculously strict defamation laws than suppressing criticism of the country.
Defamation normally means a untrue statement not a judgment.
I love Thailand as a country but they should relax the defamation thing. A while ago I wanted to criticize the human zoo they setup in the North but I was advised by some Thai friends to not say anything unless I want to get banned from the country.
Free speech is important for progress.
... human zoo?
Ok that only happened once, and only because the guy created multiple blatantly false reviews. It's not as simple as "food was shite."
> Barnes later submitted negative reviews of the hotel online, including one that said the resort’s foreign management “treat the staff like slaves”.
> Barnes later submitted negative reviews of the hotel online, including one that said the resort’s foreign management “treat the staff like slaves”.
How do you know that's "blatantly false"?
Staff in Thai hotels are not generally held in chattel slavery.
If I said my job works me like a slave do you think I'm being forced to work without pay
Following that sentence, the article mentions a rejected review that used the phrase "modern day slavery," so it's not quite the same.
It is interesting to examine the case of Brokedown Palace, which was set in Thailand, but filmed in the Philippines, because it was “critical of the Thai legal system”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brokedown_Palace#Filming
Except it was Manila and the Philippines that banned actress Claire Danes, after she slagged off Manila by basically telling lies to media outlets.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claire_Danes#Personal_life
But we’ve all known since 1984 that one night in Bangkok makes a hard man humble. https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=rgc_LRjlbTU&si=aVIPqwJfNdf...
> Sanctuary Center for Psychotic Female Vagrants
Well, that certainly is a name. (For an actual filming location in Manila, that is.)
I really doubt they would target tourists. Or are there examples?
It happened once. TripAdvisor still shows a banner on the hotel page regarding the event: https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Hotel_Review-g580110-d594766-R...
In my country platforms that do not force users to self dox are suppressed. Much cleaner for the authorities so they don't have to tip their hand and be seen doxxing.
The same thing is happening in Argentina
The bigger government gets, the less freedoms the people have. It is critically important not to ask government to solve problems (government is bad at solving most problems), and to seek ways to shrink government.
> (government is bad at solving most problems)
I reject the implication, that corporations are always better at solving most problems.
> and to seek ways to shrink government.
Id rather seek ways to maximize liberty, and while they frequently can mean limiting the government, the act of shrinking the government is not _necessary_, and even works against my goals if the government is the one keeping my liberty maximized
Yeah, aren't most businesses kind of like dictatorships, perhaps oligarchies but employees don't have a vote anyway. It's no surprise that if Trump and Musk want to run the USA as a business it kind of looks like that.
Corporations are only long lived when protected by artificial monopolies like parents, government regulations, or too big to fail bailouts. With full competition, corporations stay lean and die regularly. That is much healthier than the oligarchies created by government interference that we have today worldwide in capitalism.
The fact that your knee jerk response was to put words in his mouth, specifically the ones you chose, and then claim you stand for liberty really casts a lot of doubt on that second part.
Nowhere did he say corporations would be doing everything. There were a whole plethora of organizations and institutions (social clubs, religious adjacent institutions, etc) that used do do a lot of the public good type stuff and have fallen by the wayside or become indistinguishable from government contractors over the past 100yr as high touch western governments have usurped and stuck their noses in their functions.
>I reject the implication, that corporations are always better at solving most problems.
The only person mentioning corporations was you.
There is no alternative. Governement, or corporations. Choose one.
There in fact are many forms of community organization which are neither government nor corporation.
Those forms cannot really compete with the neighbouring (or even overseas) nation-states. Look no further than the history of the North America and Australia after the Europeans discovered those continents.
> if the government is the one keeping my liberty maximized
yeah.... but its not :)
Disagree, some programs that people call "big government" (such as Social Security, SNAP, etc) are a net good
How do you know when it's small enough?
HN User Silexia will tell you of course.
Glad to assist!
when it fears what I and my neighbors will do to it. When it personally thinks about its accountability to the people around it, on firstname basis, any time it even considers spending money.
What you’re saying is broadly true but my understanding is that the Thai government is dysfunctional in an Emperor Nero sort of way.
Are you referring to Air Marshal Fufu? The wiki article does not disappoint.