jginspace's Journal: Thai prime minister begs royal pardon for posting pic of wrong king on Facebook

Thai prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra has just fired her entire Facebook team for mistakenly posting a photo of the king's bother to mark his birthday last week. The mistake was all the more sensitive because the brother in question, Ananda Mahidol, died in mysterious circumstances in 1946.

Some say there's more to it than simple incompetence, however Thailand watchers will recall that the hapless Yingluck got her Twitter account hacked just a few weeks ago - perhaps 'the Facebook team' means 'the social networking team'.

This latest mishap illustrates the perilous waters (sorry, not a flood joke) that netizens in Thailand must navigate. A guy just got sentenced to 20 years for sending four 'off-colour' text messages. A US citizen of Thai descent just got two and a half years for merely linking to a translation of a banned book. The bloggerati and Web 2.0 crowd are suddenly living in fear - bloggers dare not link to pieces in such respected journals as The Economist or even quote the titles of the offending articles, and Facebook users have been pointedly warned that clicking 'Like' or even the failure to completely delete incoming messages could get them serious prison time.