A naked genie escapes the bottle

A video clip replete with all the nudity, jealousy and public embarrassment to make it an online magnet has upended the lives of the three people involved and further underscored the hazard inherent in careless use of the social media. One woman has been humiliated, another could face legal charges, and a man will probably never be regarded in quite the same way again.
Shared extensively on Facebook and the Line app, the clip shows a naked young woman being forcibly evicted from an apartment and her clothing tossed out after her. Though the facts have not been verified, the woman pushing her out had supposedly returned home to find her having sex with her boyfriend and recorded her response with her mobile-phone camera. She continued recording while the evicted woman put her clothes back on in the apartment corridor. The story was reported by several Thai media outlets and picked up by countless others around the world.
The drama didn’t end there. While criticism in online forums has been directed mainly at the boyfriend for apparently cheating and for failing to defend the object of his affections when she came under attack, the jealous woman has not gone unscathed. A professional “pretty” – a commercial product presenter, as is the other woman – the girlfriend has publicly apologised for her tantrum. She perhaps felt compelled to do so because the evicted woman asked police to bring charges against her under the Computer Crime Act. The jealous woman insists, though, that she didn’t put the video online, but rather lost her phone at some point, only to later discover its content being shared on the social networks.
The humiliated woman has largely been spared criticism, yet she could end up being the one who suffers most.
The ubiquitous phone video has shown time and again that it can be a double-edged sword when thousands of strangers get to see it.
There was the DJ whose blatant lie following a traffic incident “went viral”, a stunning outburst by jailed politician Chuwit Kamolvisit, and even former prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra caught in cute, decidedly non-political moments.
If the pen is mightier than the sword, the mobile phone’s ability to record anything anytime makes it even more potentially lethal. Its wounds – in the form of damaged and ruined reputations – can certainly take longer to heal. Some people deserve to be “caught on tape”, to be sure, but too often it is the comparatively innocent who suffer from the vengeful cries and conspiratorial whispers of ill-considered and mean-spirited videos.
Given the power of the social media to alter public opinion, there have been repeated calls for their prudent use. As gossip engines, the social networks are routinely wielded to embarrass, cajole and harangue.
The incident of the nude in the apartment hallway, for all its fleeting titillation, serves to demonstrate once again that information shared online, whether important or insignificant, truthful or distorted, harmless or dangerous, cannot be retrieved. Posting words, videos and photos on the Web is letting the genie out of the bottle, and it cannot be put back in.
Any user of the social media wishing for a measure of privacy is up against indomitable human curiosity. The apartment drama made its rounds with a “must-see” tag to tease casual browsers.
For every person who resisted the urge, there were tens of thousands more who happily clicked. Their reactions, like that of the woman cheated, can only be measured after the fact in terms of personal responsibility.