When a Review Can Land You in Jail
Or, How Thailand’s Severe Laws Limit Freedoms
Reverse Your Review, OR ELSE!
Ah, Thailand. Tropical beaches, colorful cuisine, Draconian computer laws. What’s that? That last item isn’t on your itinerary? Rick Steves didn’t cover it? Well, let this blog be your introduction to and your warning of the system of rules that exists in Thailand. Unless the local jail happens to be on your “must-see” list, that is.
Before we even get to the perils of reviews, let’s take a quick trip to familiarize ourselves with the country of Thailand.
Recent history in Thailand has been tumultuous to say the least. In the past century, Thailand has seen 13 successful and 9 unsuccessful coups - 8 since 1976 - along with multiple protests and a bumpy ride through the 1997 Asian financial crisis. After the most recent coup in 2014, the country has been controlled by a junta (a military or political group that rules a country after taking power by force).
This junta has restricted the civil and political rights of the Thai people and has seen a spat of lèse-majesté cases, which are, in essence, crimes against the dignity of the leadership of any country. Or to be more (and still somehow not entirely) specific:
Whoever defames, insults or threatens the King, Queen, the Heir-apparent or the Regent, shall be punished with imprisonment of three to fifteen years.
As you might assume, this is a tool that those in power can easily and effortlessly wield against political opposition and dissenters, effectively silencing critics through imprisonment and fines. Freedom of speech is not part of the equation.
Now, in this modern century, we all express ourselves pretty freely online, don’t we? I’m doing it here, I’m guessing you, Reader, you do it too. That’s where our story gets scarier and the Thailand Computer Crimes Act rears its ugly head.
Anything you post, even if it is someone else’s words, thoughts, ideas, could come back to bite you, if you somehow share or spread them online. In 2015, women were warned against posting underboob selfies and threatened with jailtime of up to five years The act bans any material that cause “damage to the country’s security or causes public panic” or “any obscene computer data which is accessible to the public.” And that’s definitely underboobs. However, actually punishing offenders proved difficult in cases where the subjects did not include their faces, something that tends to happen in underboob selfies.
In 2017, two American tourists were arrested and fined $153 each for taking “butt selfies” at a temple they had visited. The pair had been “put a watch-list after authorities had spotted the controversial social media post.” The authorities pushed for them to be deported, for their visas to be revoked, and for the tourists to be banned from reentry.
Other tourists have been similarly apprehended for taking pictures in various states of undress. That’s somewhat understandable. What defies understanding is what follows: the story of Wesley Barnes, American criminal.
Wesley Barnes was sued by the Sea View Resort after leaving this review. Well, technically this is his second review; his first was flagged by TripAdvisor and never posted, as it contained a line that stated the management “treat the staff like slaves,” which broke TripAdisor’s code of conduct.
But they must have informed the resort, which argued that the non-public-facing review broke the Computer Crimes Act by being falsified information, defamation and lies. Wesley was arrested and faced a possible $3200 fine and two to five years in jail. For leaving a frustrated review.
I’ve written before that reviews are more likely to be written in the heat of anger or the glow of excitement. Wesley and resort tell slightly different stories of the experience, but suffice to say, things did not go smoothly and only got worse once the review was written. An argument over a corking fee in part led to this negative review, and Wesley wrote it. It’s an act we don’t even dwell on in America, we just write and spite. But this is not the case in Thailand.
The latest development in this story came October 9th, 2020, with the news that Wesley can go free. If he apologizes.
“Under conditions that Mr Barnes shows his sincerity and takes full responsibility for what had happened and remedy the situation, the hotel will be delighted to drop the charge.”
…
The hotel wants Barnes to send statements to media, the Tourism Authority of Thailand, the US embassy and the Tripadvisor website this month, apologising and explaining that his reviews were written in anger.
Source: The Guardian
Yeah, he has to tell all of these entities that he’s sorry, he was upset, he didn’t mean it. Or he goes to prison.
So… there’s not much to say about that other than it’s horrible. He lost his job over this. He has to publicly say sorry and take back his own valid words. And he has a silly podcast reaching out to him for an interview.
Most of the world condemns what Thailand is doing with these laws, but given the political unsteadiness the country has seen in the past 40 years, there is no telling when things might get better, or how far they can continue to go in the wrong direction.
Just remember, when you go to Thailand, it’s Five Stars or a Night Behind Bars.
PS: Look back at the image at the top of the page, then come back down here. Eh? Strangling? Smothering? Entrapping? So much depth on this blog, man. Five Stars.
