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BANGKOK, Thailand, November 4, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) – Under Thailand’s new cybercrime law, Pornhub, along with 190 other porn sites and gambling sites, have been blocked so that citizens can no longer access them.

Puttipong Punnakanta, the country’s Minister of Digital Economy and Society, explained to reporters on November 3 that, under the country's Computer Crime Act, pornography is illegal. 

The Diplomat reported that “The move comes just days after the kingdom’s Deputy Prime Minister, Prawit Wongsuwan, issued a new policy directive calling on the Ministry of Digital Economy and Society to act against sites that caused ‘improper behavior’ among the younger generation.”

In response, some citizens of Thailand have taken to the streets and to Twitter using the #SavePornhub and #HornyPower hashtags. 
Thailand was listed “in the top 20 for daily traffic to Pornhub in 2019 and has a globally-known sex industry,” reported Sky News

Although prostitution is illegal, it is not enforced. Thailand is known as a sex tourism destination. Life in the sex industry pays the bills for many people. The new online ban, some say, is censorship and government control that should be stopped. An activist group called Anonymous Party posted a statement online saying, “We want to reclaim Pornhub. People are entitled to choices.”

Others are speculating the government has other reasons for the ban. Allegedly, one of them could be a way of halting the spread of a video compromising royal officials that has been circulating. 

The Manushya Foundation, founded in 2017 by Emilie Palamy Pradichit, is leading the fight against the porn ban in Thailand.  The foundation posted a litany of complaints against the “digital dictatorship,” including having too much power to decide what is obscene and inappropriate, for making sex taboo, and for being too conservative. The organization thinks consenting adults should be free to engage in porn. 

Manushya purports to be a “women-led & innovative non-profit organization promoting community empowerment to advance the human rights.” They boast “peoples over profit” as part of their mission. Although if that is the case, it is not clear why they would take issue with an online pornography ban when porn is considered responsible for innumerable violations of human rights. 

According to a published study by the European Centre for Law and Justice, “Pornography is on many aspects incompatible with the protection of human rights. The production and dissemination of pornographic content first represents a severe violation of porn actors’ human rights: it violates their dignity by portraying – and actually being – degrading and cruel treatments. Pornography also threatens on a greater scale the security and the well-being of children, women and men in the entire society.”