Thai monks warned not to use social site

Buddhist monks in Thailand “have been warned not to use social networking sites to flirt with girls,” InformationWeek reports, citing coverage in the Bangkok Post. The warning was associated with reports that Thai police were “investigating a rape claim against a monk” in which he was accused of using the Internet to lure and abuse a teenage girl. The prime minister reportedly asked Thailand’s Information, Communications and Technology Ministry to monitor Hi5.com for Thai monks’ use and “kick them off the site.” [For disclosure, Hi5.com is a supporter of ConnectSafely.org, a sister project of NetFamilyNews.org.] Hi5 claims to be the world’s third-largest social-networking site with 70 million members in 250 countries and several languages, including Russian and Chinese, and it claims 800,000 active members in Thailand. InformationWeek adds that Hi5’s online-safety pages “reminds users not to meet with strangers and, if they must meet an online contact in the real world, to do so in a public place and bring a parent. It urges people to think before posting and imagine that their posts could be read by parents and potential employers.”