When the protests starting growing in number and frequency earlier this year I found it rather convenient that new Covid lockdowns were declared and many of the lockdown areas just happened to be the places where anti-government protests were taking place.
These lockdowns were recently lifted at least in part due to the fact that Thailand is reopening the country to tourism. I'm quite certain they knew that the protests would resume and that is exactly what happened.
The news stations are covering this renewed protest as little as possible and when they do talk about it they try to focus on the fact that the turnout was only 3000 people or won't mention the numbers at all but simply talk about how there was "far fewer participants than in the past" or how the movement is losing steam. The media is controlled pretty closely by the government in this country so while the rest of the world thinks that their media is doctoring surveys this country isn't allowed to report on the story honestly anyway. While I don't know for sure that this is the case, I would be willing to bet that the media must first present their stories to government officials before they go to print.
They are protesting for the same reasons they were before which is the resignation of the Prime Minister, a reforming of the constitution, but this time around there was an increased focus on Article 112, which is colloquially known as the lese majeste law.
Article 112 makes it a crime to be critical of the Thai Royal Family in any way even if it is considered constructive criticism. Making statements about the Royals better be praise, or you could be facing 3 to 15 years in prison for the offense. Therefore, in this regard, the 3000 or so people that were at the protest last night could actually be in violation of this law especially the people who spoke at the event.
The main reason why people want this article scrapped is because they believe that it is used as a political weapon to silence anyone who goes against the currently ruling regime. While there are several parties in this country, one of them is considered to be more closely aligned with the Royal Family than the others and the protestors argue that this party uses Article 112 in order to detain and jail anyone who opposes them. They kind of have a point, because at this moment in time there are many people who have been arrested for participating in the protests and are being held without bail under Article 112 violations.
I would suspect that these protests will get larger in the near future just like they did before. Every move that the government made to quell this uprising simply made them larger.
The difference this time could be that the government can no longer use Covid as a weapon to shut them down because they have officially opened the country to tourism yesterday. Using Covid as an excuse to shut down protests would potentially result in needing to shut the country down again.
What i suspect will be more likely is they will do that thing where they say you can't have more than 20 people in a place or something silly like that despite the fact that all the country's shopping malls are currently open and packed with people.