A Thai Cabinet member is threatening to try to shut down Facebook in the country. He says that Facebook doesn’t do enough to check the ads it runs, which leaves people open to expensive scams.
Thailand’s minister of digital economy and society, Chaiwut Thanakamanusorn, said in a statement on Monday that he is ready to go to criminal court by the end of the month to argue that Thailand should shut down Facebook.
He said that Thai officials had already asked Facebook’s parent company, Meta, to take down fake ads, which led to more than 5,000 being stopped, but the problem still exists.
He said that Facebook ads or fake profiles often pretend to be from reputable financial and investment advisers giving high profits. This leads people into scams where they lose their money.
When called by phone on Tuesday, Meta in Thailand asked that questions be sent to its press department by email. The press department did not reply right away to a request for comment on the minister’s claims.
It wasn’t clear right away how quickly the court could decide on the case if the ministry brought it there.
Facebook is very popular in Thailand, where more than half of the country’s 66 million people have an account.
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