The Digital Economy and Society Ministry has agreed to drop the plan to block Facebook access in Thailand after the social media network agreed to block more of the illicit posts requested by the ministry.
The US-based social network blocked 178 of all 309 posts the ministry requested as of Friday, according to Takorn Tansathit, secretary-general of the National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission (NBTC).
"We found Facebook did not block the remaining 131 posts because it has yet to receive the original court orders to block them. That's why Facebook didn't block all the posts by 10am on Tuesday," he said.
The NBTC and the ministry are satisfied with Facebook's cooperation, he added. "After Facebook received the original court orders, it blocked them within 24 hours."
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The ministry will send the court orders for another 34 posts to Facebook on Tuesday, after which it expects the social network to block them within 24 hours, Mr Takorn said.
The ministry will also speed up coordinating with the Technology Crime Suppression Division to seek the court orders for the remaining 97 posts.
"We should be able to block all the illicit posts by this month," he said.
Earlier, the ministry threatened legal action against Facebook by the Tuesday deadline and planned to order Thai ISPs to block the access if Facebook did not comply with its requests.
The trouble with having the ISPs do the blocking is that it is very difficult for them to do so selectively or by posts or URLs because the communication between a user's browser and the Facebook website is encrypted. One has to know the servers where the illicit posts are located to successfully block them -- something the Thai ISPs have no knowledge about. The other way is to block the entire Facebook.com domain, which means all 47 million Facebook users in Thailand will be blocked as well.
Mr Takorn said the tough actions were intended for strict law enforcement.
He admitted coordination between the NBTC and the ministry might not be very close, resulting in Facebook not receiving all of the court orders.
Mr Takorn and representatives from the ministry and chief of the technology crime police visited the office of the Thai Internet Service Provider Association on Ratchadaphisek Road on Tuesday to follow up on the implementation of its order.
The authorities hope for more Facebook cooperation in the long run since the number of posts with illicit content is steadily increasing, Mr Takorn said.
"From now on, when the court endorses the offences, the ministry and the NBTC will directly send the information to both Tispa and Facebook to shorten the time it takes to block the illegal content," he said.
Earlier, Facebook said governments might contact and ask it to restrict access to illegal content.
"When we receive such a request, it is scrutinised to determine if the specified content does indeed violate local laws. If we determine that it does, then we make it unavailable in the relevant country or territory and notify people who try to access it why it is restricted."