It's a completely ridiculous story: A guy writes a bad review for a resort in Thailand, they didn't like the bad review, found out who he was, and then had police put him in jail. there is a lot more to the story than just this but this is the general gist of it.
In a shell, a guy was unhappy at a resort and really went out of his way to write bad reviews of this place that otherwise had glowing reviews in its arsenal of reviews and it could be argued that he went a bit far by writing multiple bad reviews and even creating several accounts to write more bad reviews about the place.
So he was an asshole for doing that for sure but since this is Thailand and the owners of the resort knew who he was (we wasn't trying to hide his identity) they tracked him down and actually put the guy in JAIL for it.
I'm no fan of Trip Advisor, and think that anyone that believes the reviews on there can be trusted is of the lowest common denominator of society seeing as how there is little to no verification that you have actually ever even been to a place before you can write a review for it. How else can you explain hat the best places to eat in some places in the world don't actually exist and were just experiments that a group of lads with a sense of humor set out to accomplish.
The site is not a legitimate form of figuring out where to go and what to do. It is too easily manipulated. But putting someone in JAIL for writing a bad review is not the sort of world that I want to live in.
It took some time but TripAdvisor struck back in a sort of half-assed way
Even though I am not a fan of Trip Advisor apparently they paid the legal fees of the tourist and he has since left the country. TA has also docked the hotel's visibility severely limiting the amount of views that the property will have when people are searching for a place to stay on the island of Koh Chang. Previously, all ability to write reviews of the property were disabled but I am going to go ahead and make a prediction: This story hit the New York Times and millions of people are going to be writing fake 1-star reviews for the property in the not-too-distant future. They will be changing the name of the establishment soon in order to bypass this and probably hire a bunch of people in India to put their name back toward the top of the list.
There are only 85 properties on the entire island of Koh Chang anyway so it shouldn't take too long.
I have to give kudos to Trip Advisor (even though I think they are a useless company for travel advice) for intervening on this persons behalf. But I also look at this situation the same way that I do with just about everything in Thailand, if not the entire world: The rich get to do whatever they want and can use the might of the police to do their bidding if need be. The rest of us have to fend for ourselves.