A week after it blocked access to YouTube, the Thai government ordered one of the country’s most popular chat sites to shut its political forum because of postings deemed insulting to the monarch.

The political chat room of www.pantip.com was closed Sunday after authorities ordered its creators to pull the forum off-line temporarily, Vissanu Meeyoo, a spokesman for the ministry of information and technology, said. The chat room carried frequent postings that criticised the leaders of a September coup and the current military-backed government.

The government also asked operators of another two websites to block comments that could be deemed harmful to national security or insulting to King Bhumibol Adulyadej.

The Southeast Asian Press Alliance, which promotes press freedom in the region, said that it “condemns the government order shutting down the political chat room on Pantip.com.”

“(We) call on the Thai government to respect and preserve the integrity of the internet as a medium for independent and alternative voices in the kingdom,” it said in a statement.

YouTube, the popular video-sharing site, has been blocked in Thailand since Wednesday last week because of videos that mocked the king. Google, YouTube’s owner, has refused to remove the videos but has said that it is working with the Thai government to resolve the impasse.

The creator of the video that sparked the dispute apparently deleted it at the end of last week, but since then dozens more similar videos have been posted.

Insulting the monarchy in Thailand is a criminal offence. Last month, a Swiss man was imprisoned for ten years for vandalising portraits of the king in northern Thailand.

Pantip.com initially posted a notice saying that its political forum, known as the Rajdamnoen Room, was suspended at the ministry’s request for “national security” reasons, but the message was later withdrawn. The forum is named after an area of Bangkok that has historically been the centre of pro-democracy protests.

The site’s founder, Wanchat Padungrat, was quoted by The Nation newspaper as saying he had found no postings that insulted the monarchy and did not understand the reason for the government’s ban. He said the ministry did not specify which messages were offensive and implied that the government might have been offended by anti-coup postings.

The site called on its members yesterday to post messages condemning Google for not removing the video clips that mocked the king. More than a thousand people had posted messages within the first few hours of the forum’s opening.