Seems like a messed up situation and i would like to side with the guest, but given I don’t have a culture frame of reference I wouldn’t be too fast to judge the resort.
"There are 3 main reasons that forced us to file a complaint – We are not suing him for just a
single bad review:
1. He left fabricated stories on his reviews on TripAdvisor and Google that included
xenophobic connotations, accusations of slavery and even comments that could mislead
readers to associate our property with the Coronavirus.
2. He had been posting reviews roughly 1-2 weeks apart with obvious defamatory
intentions. We chose to file a complaint to serve as a deterrent, as we understood he
may continue to write negative reviews week after week for the foreseeable future.
3. Despite our multiple efforts to contact him to resolve this in an amicable way for well
over a month, he chose to ignore us completely. He only replied to our emails, messages
on review sites, etc. once he had been notified of our complaint by the authorities."
Yet the worldwide spread of this news story has done a million times more damage than a few reviews could have. Smart, now people are talking about avoiding Thailand all together.
If you want to be a tourist destination and at the same time threaten the freedom of your guests with such draconian laws, then you got a problem.
I read years ago that an American woman in Pakistan was arrested for walking on the street wearing short pants (wasn't modest enough). Tourists should know these things to be able to adapt or avoid.
You can see what a load of BS is right from the one review screenshotted in the article. Point 1 boils down to:
- “manager is Czech and full of himself” - xenophobic my ass (preemptively: I’m Czech and no way in hell would I see such statement as having “xenophobic connotations”
- He wrote “avoid like the coronavirus” - that can’t mislead anyone with non-zero reading comprehension to “associate the property”
The review said the owners treat the staff like slaves [1] and that was just one of many bad reviews. It's not exactly simply writing a bad review.
Regardless, I do agree it's excessive, but each country has its fair share of strange laws and regulations. For example, as a European everything related to firearms in the US is just as incomprehensible to me.
Defamation is a very serious crime there. The hotel had hard evidence and, I presume, saying a hotel practices modern day slavery is very high up in the list. In light of that, it doesn't seem that preventive detention, which I assume was the case here, is that unreasonable.
There's realpolitik on the other side of this coin as well.
The ongoing coup d'etat means that this isn't simply a matter of "follow local laws", but also a matter of "risk that this becomes a litmus test for the western world's orientation toward Thailand's new system of government".
Cracking down on US tourists for speech violations is exactly the sort of thing hawkish senators in the US might latch onto. If that happens, Thailand becomes a de facto Chinese satellite state.
Which is all to say: domestic affairs are never exactly domestic when foreign nationals are involved. Normally the stakes are low, but in Thailand's case the particular moment is fraught with risk. The juice seems not worth the squeeze.
This didn't make the news because it contradicts what people know about thai law. A single complaint from a business to police over a review that gets someone taken from their job and put in jail is not reasonable and most would consider it a gross abuse of power, legal or not.
I'm not convinced that defamation laws are absolutely abhorrent. It's possible to ruin someone's life with verbal harassment, especially when given amplified powers via social media.
Seems like a messed up situation and i would like to side with the guest, but given I don’t have a culture frame of reference I wouldn’t be too fast to judge the resort.