The official Patong Police Facebook page was taken offline by Facebook on Friday (Jan 3).
The administrator of the page, Khun Pae, told The Phuket News that he has been informed that the suspension will be for five days.
He expects the page to be back online tomorrow or Wednesday (Jan 7-8).
“We just update cases we handle every day as usual, but when I opened the page on Friday, they said our content violates rights,” Khun Pae said.
The suspension was enacted as Facebook deemed that the content published violated rights and included violent content.
“I don’t even know which post Facebook considers reportable; we have no idea why it needed to be shut down,” Khun Pae said, confused.
Patong Police have for years upheld their standards in their Facebook posts, not showing any suspects faces and often obscuring names of suspects who had been charged and fined for offenses.
Most recently Patong Police have been posting a continual stream of reports confirming how many people had been caught and fined for drunk driving in Patong ‒ thus highlighting a key safety initiative being taken seriously by Patong Police officers.
“The page will be reactivated soon, and we will continue to provide updates on the same page,” Khun Pae assured.
Of note, The Phuket News last year repeatedly experienced the same issues with posts being removed from Facebook. One post was removed because it was marked as spam, simply because it linked to a Phuket News story about visa-free travel to Thailand.