On 23 Nov, Grp Cpt Anudith Nakornthap, Minister of Information and Communications Technology, said that the Ministry had asked Facebook headquarters to delete over 10,000 URLs or pages which contained pictures and messages offensive to the monarchy.

The contents were posted from abroad, and that made it difficult for the Ministry to close them, he said.

He asked anybody who found such contents not to press ‘Like’ or make comments because that would be indirect dissemination. He admitted that offensive content had been rapidly spread in the past 2-3 days. To help disseminate this is an offence under the 2007 Computer Crimes Act, he said.

Peerapol Anuttarasote, a reporter for the Thai News Agency, tweeted through @yoware that during the last three months the MICT had contacted Facebook to eliminate 50 accounts.

Although Facebook has a rule not to reveal posters’ IP addresses, it has yielded to requests to delete inappropriate content and has done so more quickly than before, the reporter said, adding that the MICT insists that it can track down the posters.

Earlier this week, a Facebook account entitled ‘Report Society of Thailand’ was created with the mission to prevent and report on threats via Facebook.  The threats include spam, fake [Facebook] accounts, infringements of intellectual property rights, immoral or violent content, and lèse majesté.

The group urges other Facebook users not to press ‘Like’, share or make comments on targeted pages, but to report them to Facebook staff by clicking on ‘Report page’ and choosing ‘Hate speech’ and its subcategory ‘Targets a race or ethnicity’ (which they include the royal family, nationality, humankind or race in their definition in Thai).

They also organize what they call ‘bomb reports’ in which they and their friends bombard Facebook staff with reports at an agreed time.