On September 9, 2026, Thailand's Office of the Consumer Protection Board (OCPB) opened a public consultation, running to October 10, on a draft amendment to the Consumer Protection Act. According to Tilleke & Partners and Baker McKenzie, the draft extends advertising rules to digital platforms and social media. It creates an "advertising service providers" category for influencers, content creators, livestreamers, affiliate marketers and virtual influencers. It recognises QR codes and barcodes as valid electronic labels, limits "consumer" to individuals and non-profits, and doubles most penalties.
A caveat on sourcing: I could not retrieve the draft text from the OCPB, so the details below come from two law-firm summaries. Where they differ, I say so.
The case for the reform
The strongest argument for the draft is that the law has not kept pace with how advertising works. The Consumer Protection Act B.E. 2522 (1979), adopted April 30, 1979, regulates advertising, labelling and contracts. It was written for newspapers and broadcasters. A paid livestream pitching a supplement to a million followers sits in a grey area. A regulator that cannot say who the "advertiser" is in that situation cannot protect anyone.
A disclosure duty is a modest fix for this. Tilleke reports that influencers would have to disclose when content is advertising, and to reveal their relationship with the business, where they receive money, benefits, or free or discounted products. Disclosure is a pro-speech remedy. It adds information to the market and does not suppress any message. Recognising QR codes as legal labels is also a good change. It lets businesses put multilingual or updated product information online and drop printed inserts.
Where proportionality starts to fail
The problem is the penalty design. Tilleke reports that penalties rise to six months to two years' imprisonment and fines of THB 100,000 to 400,000 for some offences. It reports that advertising violations carry up to six months' imprisonment and/or a THB 100,000 fine. The two firms' summaries do not settle exactly which offences each figure covers, so the final text matters.
Doubling the numbers across the board is a blunt choice. A fraudulent health claim that harms people and an influencer who forgets a "#ad" tag are very different offences. A graduated scheme would reserve prison for deliberate deception and use warnings and small administrative fines for first disclosure lapses. The draft's headline response is to double most penalties.
The larger concern is platform liability. Tilleke says digital platform owners hosting advertisements would face penalties identical to those of the underlying offenders. If that survives, a platform would carry the same criminal exposure as the advertiser it hosts. That gives platforms a strong incentive to over-remove. A platform cannot realistically pre-screen millions of livestream segments and affiliate posts for disclosure compliance. The rational response is to take down borderline content, or to demand pre-clearance from small sellers. Thai micro-merchants who sell through social commerce would bear that cost first.
A workable alternative is the notice-and-action model. Liability would attach when a platform has actual knowledge of a specific violation, for example after an OCPB notice, and fails to act within a defined period. That targets platforms that ignore complaints and does not turn every host into a guarantor.
Are the influencer duties workable?
The influencer category is the most defensible part of the draft, but definitions still need work. "Virtual influencers" and "affiliate marketers" are broad terms. A hobbyist who shares an affiliate link, or a brand-run virtual avatar, could be swept in alongside professional agencies. The final text should set a clear trigger, such as compensation received, and should exclude purely editorial or personal content.
Narrowing "consumer" to individuals and non-profits is a separate, defensible choice. It focuses the Act on people who lack bargaining power, though it also removes small for-profit firms from the Act's protection. Tilleke's summary describes the definition slightly differently, as including non-profits and end users who do not pay directly, so this is another point the text must settle.
The PDPA connection
The draft does not itself rewrite data protection rules, but it will meet them in practice. Tilleke says the draft gives officials power to demand computer and electronic data during investigations. Influencer and affiliate marketing runs on personal data: audience analytics, tracking links and customer lists. The Personal Data Protection Committee (PDPC) has moved from guidance to fines. Tilleke's August 2025 roundup counted eight administrative fines in five cases, totalling about THB 21.5 million. The largest single fine was THB 7 million, for a breach and a failure to appoint a data protection officer. The recurring failures were weak security, late breach notification and missing DPOs.
Two regulators now sit over the same businesses: the PDPC over how data is handled, and the OCPB over what is advertised and how. A small Thai seller could face a disclosure notice from one and a data-security complaint from the other over the same campaign. Data demands under the Consumer Protection Act should be tied to the PDPA's existing purpose-limitation and security rules, and the draft should say so. Otherwise compliance costs will rise for the SMEs that the digital economy depends on.
What the consultation should change
The consultation runs to October 10, so the window is short. Three amendments would keep the draft's benefits and cut its costs:
- Graduate the penalties, with prison reserved for deliberate deception and fines or warnings for first disclosure lapses.
- Replace identical platform liability with notice-and-action liability that depends on actual knowledge.
- Define "advertising service provider" by compensation and commercial intent, and add a clear carve-out for personal and editorial speech.
Thailand is right to modernise a 1979 statute. The draft should still be judged by whether it makes honest advertisers' lives easier, as well as by how hard it punishes dishonest ones.