Thai Premier Spams Nation, Prompts Consumer Outcry

patiwat writes "Newly installed Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva's first act was to send a spam SMS to tens of millions of Thai cell phone subscribers. The message, signed 'Your PM,' urged people to help him solve the Thai political crisis and respond with their postal code at a charge of 3 baht (10 US cents). The new premier was criticized for violating privacy regulations."

Comments

Re:Not really spam

[dov_0]

Maybe we could view electoral commission letters and tax office demands as junk mail. We may not have given our details personally and they also sent mail to thousands of other people!

Re:Not really spam

[Admiral Ag]

He should have been honest and said: "Hi, I'm your new Prime Minister who was installed by the military and the middle classes, because the poor majority of our country finally got it into their stupid heads to get together and vote for a party that more or less represented their interests. This is not allowed. Democracy is not about having a government that gets the most votes, but about serving the interests of the middle class and wealthy."

It's the same old sad story.

This guy and his supporters deserve something more than a reply to a text message.

Re:Hmmmm...

[Daengbo]

I may be misremembering, but I'm pretty sure that Thaksin (the deposed PM from two years ago) sold all his stock in the telecom and moved the money to Singapore in the weeks before the coup.

Also, the new PM is from a coalition of minor Thai parties and has nothing to do with Thaksin.

This story also appears to be a non-starter in Thailand. I went back to the 18th at thairath.co.th (a Thai language newspaper) and found no mention of this story in the political section.

Anyway, I'm not sure I would consider it spam if Obama had a message stating something like "I, the new President, invite you, the people of the U.S., to join together and help us rise out of our current situation. I welcome your comments." (The picture in the Bangkok Post is too blurry for me to make out every word the Thai PM wrote, but that's the gist of it.) In fact, I fully expect Obama to do something very similar in his first week, though it will be an announcement on TV pre-empting your favorite show. I doubt it will be quite as short or too the point, either.

Re:Not really spam

[mjwx]

Moreover, Thailand has good radio and television penetration. There is one TV for every two Thai people. He could easily have gone on TV and radio.

The thing is that there are two Mobile Phones for every one Thai person.

If you've ever met a Thai you'll find that they are married to the phone. Mobile coverage is better then TV and Radio combined in Thailand.

This wasn't an emergency communication. It was just a "hi from the new prime minister", and the responses would do no more than give him an idea of the geographic distribution of his support. It isn't even a good survey technique.

This is just the information he would need to strengthen his power base and weaken his oppositions. If you think that American politicians are petty and corrupt, you've never learned about Thai politics, they take pork barrel spending to a whole new level. Abhisit is learning who he needs to appease to stay in power, his predecessor did the same thing.