YouTube incident becomes Internet crusade

By BangkokPost.com

A new video slideshow attacking His Majesty the King indicates that the dispute, fanned into worldwide front-page headlines by a Thai government ban on YouTube, may have only just begun.

YouTube and Google wiped out the last remnants of the original offensive video slideshow which was uploaded last Sunday to demean the monarch.

The video that triggered the government ban on YouTube disappeared from the video-sharing website on Thursday afternoon, and the anonymous user who posted it was banned.

Some time early Friday morning Thailand time, the last remaining photo of the video in YouTube's search engine archive of the original video had disappeared from view.

But within an hour of the disappearance of the first video and its uploader, a subscriber using the name "thaifreespeech" and claiming improbably to live in Iceland had placed an all new video on YouTube, containing even more offensive images of His Majesty the King than the original.

"Thaifreespeech" also added an attack on Thai lese majeste laws and asked rhetorically if "US people in the US (should) respect Thai traditions and rule of law".

In an hour, the number of views of the video rocketed from 122 to 7,856 and going up. Comments in the same hour early this morning Thailand time rose from nine to 160. As before, most commenters attacked the video, often in rude terms.

The ban on YouTube by Information and Communication Technology Minister Sitthichai Pookaiyaudom now seems to have touched off a firestorm of web-based retaliation that could see rapid escalation of offensive references to the monarchy on the Internet.

As of this morning, there was no record on YouTube that either the original video, or the anonymous user "paddidda" who uploaded it, ever had existed. Both have been completely whitewashed.

There were many text references and descriptions of the video on Google, which owns YouTube. But Google Images shows no part of the video, and Google Video - a separate, but aligned service with YouTube - had a record of the video but no image.

The YouTube whitewash was the minimum demand of Mr Sitthichai to give the order to restore direct access to YouTube by Thai Internet users.

The new video, and the likelihood that many will follow, on YouTube and on dozens of other video services, raises the stakes hugely.

The ban on YouTube will stay, officials said on Friday.

"This group of people has found another outlet, taking another action that is considered very offensive to the king," said Mr Sitthichai's spokesman Vissanu Meeyoo, also of the ministry of information technology and communications.

"Thailand doesn't want to take this kind of action. We are just doing it temporarily," he said of the ban imposed on Tuesday.

Thai officials planned to meet later Friday with an association of Internet users to discuss ways of policing the Internet, the spokesman said.

"We need cooperation from Internet users to monitor these groups," he added.

YouTube spokeswoman Julie Supan, apparently forgetting Google and YouTube have blocked thousands of videos, photos, web pages and entire sites on government requests, said the Google subsidiary was "disappointed" with Thailand's ban on YouTube.

"We have asked the government to lift the block, and we look forward to the resumption of service to our Thai users," spokeswoman Julie Supan said. She seemed unaware that people outside the United States might have cultural differences with her country, pointing out that there are many videos attacking the elected US politician, President George W. Bush.

Meanwhile, the government decision to "filter" the entire site for customers of Thai Internet providers has drawn sharp criticism from media freedom groups, who said it highlighted a growing trend for the military government to censor political expression on the Internet.

"It's another example of how silly and ineffective censorship really is," said CJ Hinke, coordinator of the group FACT - Freedom Against Censorship Thailand.

His group, which lobbies for an end to online censorship, says Thailand's government has blocked a total of 45,000 websites.

Bangkok Post

Friday April 06, 2007