The new digital economy and society minister has withdrawn his predecessor’s threat to close Thai access to Facebook in retaliation for its inability to curb rampant scam ads.
Prasert Chanthararuangthong said on Thursday that blocking Facebook access in the country would have widespread impacts on millions of business operators who depend on the social network, and on some 45 million general Facebook users.
Mr Prasert’s predecessor, Chaiwut Thanakamanusorn, said last month that he would seek a court order to block Facebook access because his calls for it to remove fraudulent ads had gone unheeded.
Facebook-based scams were causing huge damage to Thais, said Mr Chaiwut, a deputy leader of the coalition-member Palang Pracharath Party.
Mr Prasert, also the secretary-general of the coalition-leading Pheu Thai Party, said he would negotiate with Facebook executives in Singapore and Thailand to block scam advertisements.
He admitted that scams were a major issue and he planned to set up a special centre in three months to fight them. The centre would use artificial intelligence (AI) to detect abnormal financial transactions, Mr Prasert said.
Mr Chaiwut complained last month that Facebook had failed to screen out fraud via scammers’ sponsored pages, despite requests for cooperation from the ministry and related agencies for many years.
Of all the online investment scams that take place in Thailand, around 70% originate on Facebook, he said.
Prae Dumrongmongcolgul, country director for Meta, the parent of Facebook, said the company used AI to detect fraudulent ads and took them down immediately when they were discovered.
However, scammers continue to evolve and Facebook algorithms sometimes need time to catch up with them, she added.