Facebook has rebutted Thai Facebook users’ concerns that the company has compromised its privacy policy to the Thai government, following the arrests of online activists charged with private Facebook chat content.
On Tuesday, 10 May 2016, Facebook insisted that it never provides user information and does not cooperate with the Thai junta’s censorship practice, rejecting the allegations in the past few weeks that Facebook has supported the junta in the recent cyber crackdown against the junta critics, reported BBC Thai.
“Facebook uses advanced systems to keep people’s information secure and tools to keep their accounts safe, and we do not provide any government with direct access to people’s data,” Facebook responded, quoted by Sunai Phasuk, advisor of Human Rights Watch Thailand.
The junta’s latest cyber crackdown started on 27 April when the military abducted the eight admins of anti-junta Facebook pages in the early morning and then accused them of Computer Crime Act and Article 116 of the Criminal Code, the sedition law.
The question toward Facebook’s policy was triggered when Harit Mahaton, one of the eight who additionally got a lese majeste charge, said that the police had shown him a capture of his Facebook chat without knowing the password.
The allegation was intensified when Patnaree Charnkij, a mother of an anti-junta activist, was charged by the lese majeste law due to her responding “Ja” (‘Hmm’ in English), in Facebook chat to allegedly defamatory messages.
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