Noisy tour group creates more anti-foreigner controversy online

It's getting a bit old honestly, and I hope that the Thai people that end up seeing these locally viral videos take it with a grain of salt as well because creating an anti-foreigner sentiment in a country that genuinely needs outside travel and investment to maintain their GDP is not a good idea. The two cannot co-exist.

Now in this recent video, which went viral on TikTok, features Thai woman who sounds youngish, berating a group of foreign teenagers or 20-somethings who were doing what people that age do generally, and that was being a bit noisy on public transport.

They were not being aggressively loud and were only talking to one another but there were a lot of them and well, a lot of teenagers have a tendency to get loud. I know this is true with Thai kids as well since my high school level classrooms require a lot of "crowd control" in order to keep the noise levels down.

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The BTS is the skytrain in Bangkok and the suggestion that it is always quiet on this train, as the headline would suggest, is true. Thai people generally are quite polite in situations like this so the woman is not wrong. However, her filming them rather than talking to them would have made me upset as well and that is what happened with this group. One of the students said "he is not 18 you cannot film him" which is such a foreigner or perhaps USA sort of thing to say. Yes you can film him you dolt.

I don't necessarily recommend that you watch all of that but if you do, you will see that both parties are at fault. The youth should try to keep it down but have you ever tried to control a large group of teenagers? Unless they are super conditioned like the Japanese are, this is a very tough thing to pull off.

The group says at one point in the video that they don't know what their stop is and need to coordinate with one another about which stop to get off at and this is fair enough, but they were being a lot louder than they need to be.

This clip is making the rounds a lot more than I would like to see it doing so but I suppose there could be a silver lining here: maybe other young people will take this clip as a warning or perhaps they were unaware that the train culture here is one of quiet or just whispering or talking with a low volume if you need to speak at all.

I'll admit that the lack of noise is part of what makes the BTS and the underground version of it so much nicer than other places public transport and I definitely don't want that to change.

I just hope that a bunch of people don't do something stupid like start to hate on all foreigners because of the actions of a few. This incident is really minor compared to others that I have posted and it seems as though the bar has been lowered as far as what is viral-worthy... These days it seems as though people are posting just whatever and the anti-foreigner sentiment continues to grow.

nobody will win if that is the end result