Thai Government: We Need to Censor the Media

CENSORSHIP / RESTRICTIONS LIKELY

Govt panel to control 'inappropriate' media

Bangkok Post

ANJIRA ASSAVANONDA & ACHARA ASHAYAGACHAT

The government has set up a national committee to place controls on television, film, magazines and websites to ensure a ''safe and creative media'', Deputy Prime Minister Paiboon Wattanasiritham said yesterday. The committee will be tasked with putting tight controls on media content to ensure items that it deems to be inappropriate for young people are not published.

Mr Paiboon, who is also the social development and human security minister, will chair the committee which will have its first meeting at Government House tomorrow.

The panel consists of representatives from government ministries as well as operators of search engine websites such as Google, MSN, and Truehits.

He said one of the first major issues the committee could look into is trying to stop websites hosting advertisements for 1-900 telephone services, which use tempting internet ads to lure teenagers.

''The services use sexually alluring advertisements such as 'call this number to exchange of sexual experiences' or 'to find students working on the side for commercial sex call here,'' he said.

''The messages are posted openly on the websites as if the laws do not exist.''

He said there were some 500,000 web pages in Thailand that are sexually seductive, and 250 websites showing nude video clips of teenagers.

Knowledge of the websites and the clips spread quickly and the websites have networks to gather the background information of the girls' email addresses for direct contact with them, he said.

''For example, we monitored a pornographic clip on the internet of a girl who looked like a famous actress and found it had 300,000 visits in two weeks,'' he said.

There are brothels on every major street in Bangkok, yet the Thai government wants to protect us from inappropriate sexual conduct in the media.