Online service providers on their toes after the court ruling against Prachatai’s webmaster

The Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld the lower court’s sentence of a suspended eight-month jail term and a fine of Bt20,000 against Chiranuch Premchaiporn, the director of Prachatai online newspaper.

This case will clearly have an impact on most online service providers, such as commercial and social media websites as well as web-boards, because they will have to closely monitor to see if any comments are violating the law, especially Article 112. 

Apisilp Trunganont, co-founder and chief technology officer at Internet Marketing, the operator of Thailand’s largest web-board pantip.com, said that on the website there are three mechanisms to manage content, which is generated by 4.5 million active daily users posting between 5,000 and 6,000 times and encouraging over 100,000 comments per day.

The first measure is a programme that monitors sensitive key words, especially those related to lese majeste, and as soon as it finds any mention of sensitive information, it will immediately send a report to pantip.com’s response team to verify the post before taking action.

The second mechanism gets users to inform pantip.com’s team to take care of the case, while the third level of control has dedicated teams monitoring web-board sessions where users may be discussing sensitive issues, especially those related to the monarchy.

Generally, Apisilp said, pantip.com always monitors all the content on pantip.com and has strict measures to manage inappropriate content. 

“The content management team on pantip.com is very conservative and even though some posts may not be illegal, they may be removed because they are inappropriate, such as sale of products or personal tiffs," he said. 

In his capacity as president of the Thai Webmaster Association, Apisilp also said that website service providers cannot deny legal responsibility as it is their role to monitor and remove inappropriate content from their website, otherwise it would seem they find the content acceptable. 

Also, as the Computer Crimes Act authorises officers the right to request log files, the webmaster should comply with the law. 

Meanwhile, Jakrapong Kongmalai, vice president of Content Business at Sanook, another often-used website in the Kingdom, said a lot of users visited sanook.com daily and they were content monitoring and checking measures in place to control inappropriate content and prevent spam. Users are also bound by the website’s terms and conditions to not duplicate topics in different web-board sessions. 

He said users can only select one web-board session per topic and that all duplicated posts will be deleted from the system, adding that anybody found posting duplications will be blocked from sanook.com. 

Users are also not allowed to post content that can provoke social violence, is an infringement of content, phone numbers, images that may be considered inappropriate for the young or one that violates copyright laws. Those who break these rules stand to face legal action.