Junta shuts down Facebook page for revealing police checkpoint locations

[buksida]

Police in Thailand have pressured the owner of a popular Facebook page that revealed the locations of police checkpoints into shutting it down.

The move appears to be a part of a larger campaign to improve Thailand’s woeful road safety standards. The first indication came Tuesday when police said they may sue people who reveal the locations of checkpoints.

On Thursday afternoon a Thai-language page named ‘We Love Police Stop’ with more than 100,000 ‘likes’ was taken down from Facebook.

Pattaya One reported: “The Police began scouring the Law Books to see if they could lawfully force the page to close and they found a clause within the Computer Crimes Act of 2007 which meant they could threaten the owner of the page with criminal action should the page not be removed.”

It is not clear whether the owner of the Facebook page will be charged.

While on this occasion it opted to go straight to the page’s owner, Thailand, like all countries, can submit content removal requests directly to Facebook. Indeed, such content removal requests have risen sharply under the ruling junta that took power in last year’s coup.

In March we reported that Facebook removed content deemed to be in breach of Thailand’s lèse majesté laws 30 times in the second half of 2014 following requests from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs or the Thai CERT (Computer Security Incident Response Team).

While heavy censorship in Thailand remains a serious issue, the junta’s moves to increase road safety must be welcomed.

Thailand’s roads are among the most dangerous in the world. It is ranked second in the world in terms of traffic fatalities, with 44 deaths per 100,000 people (5.1 percent of Thailand’s overall deaths), according to statistics from the World Health Organization and The University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute in the United States.

Thai officials also announced measures this week to clamp down on the country’s burgeoning street-racing culture, including increasing fines from 500 baht to 5,000 baht and impounding vehicles.

Source: Asian Correspondent

[Takiap]

Personally, I can understand why the police took this stance, and I'll even go as far as saying I support such a move. However, in my opinion the police checkpoints have very little, if anything at all, to do with road safety.

Yes, occasionally localized checkpoints are set up to boost the MIB Tea Fund, in which case a few people will get pulled for no helmets and etc. Most of the tie though, I have always got the impression that checkpoints were/are aimed more at netting smugglers and etc.


Also, I'm not sure if taking down the FB page will make much of a difference since all Thais have mobile phones.

A while back I returned home from town early morning and warned my BIL that the police had a checkpoint set up outside his college, and that they were fining students arriving without helmets. He laughed and told me he already knows because he had been phoned and told about it.


As for the street racers.............It's amazing how so many parents have no desire to know what their kids get up to. I think the police should seize the bikes of those caught racing; the bikes should be sold at auction, and parents fined for allowing their kids to ride their motorbikes without a license. Of course if the parents deny giving their kids the keys, then charge the kids with theft.

The current 500 fine is nothing more than a bad joke to most of these kids. Maybe some good old community service would be a better solution.

[JuiceLover]

I wonder how they gonna get around apps like Waze?
https://www.waze.com/