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Some time ago we were writing about the new laws against piracy that in my opinion are going to shake the foundation of internet usage. Recently, Twitter announced that it will begin censoring tweets. It appears that this was the action Thai authorities were waiting for a long time.

According to ICT permanent secretary Jeerawan Boonperm, this was a right decision from Twitter, and they are looking forward for a “welcomed development”. We are speaking here about the same government that just last year addressed Facebook and requested the removal of over 10.000 pages that were in contradiction with state laws. Jeerawan suggested this was the perfect time for collaborating with Twitter regarding the new feature.

For those of you who don’t know, in Thailand there is a lese majeste law that forbids citizens to openly criticize what the king and his royal family are doing. Because of this law, there was a massive block of YouTube back in 2006. After all the required videos were made inaccessible from Thailand, the video sharing site was allowed to broadcast in Thailand again.

And this is not an isolate case. Brazil was also one of the countries that requested from the giant corporation the removal of around 225 videos. According to YouTube officials, there were two requests coming from two separate places the Ministry of Information, Communication and Technology. These stated that Google should remove those videos, and to not allow visitors from this country to be able to see them ever again.

This is not a surprise after all, if we take a look in the years before the new piracy laws were issued. In those years, censorship was already an ordinary thing especially regarding the lese majeste content. At some point we should remember the campaign that officials held in order to block Twitter, Facebook and other services in the country. And to make things worse just last year, Mallika Boonmetrakul, deputy spokeswoman of the opposition Democrat Party, issued a statement and also tried to gather support for an all out block of all western social media sites. According to her, the example set by China was the right one and people shouldn’t have access to all the worse things coming from the “outside.”

What the Thailand government doesn’t understand is that companies like Twitter are trying to increase, and also offer transparency on their products, and operations. It doesn’t encourage real censorship, and furthermore, from now on people will be allowed to see how governments, and their censorship programs work. What we can say is that for people living in Thailand and also other persons around the world there are enough ways on the internet to go around these restrictions and a Google search is enough to find them.

At the time being there were no arrests made in Thailand regarding the Twitter case. But learning from history I am sure that lots of them will happen in a short time. Some time ago, numerous Thai people were sentenced to jail for posting messages on Facebook and Internet. Among others there was the case of a 61-year-old man who got a 20 year prison sentence just for sending an inappropriate text message that was caught by the censorship machine. Another case worth remembering that happened last year was that of a Thai-US citizen who was condemned to two and a half years to prison for translating a banned book about Thailand’s king.

Twitter’s new censorship rules will probably increase the number of persons being arrested this year in Thailand so be careful what you tweet.