Praise the Regime, Hate the Opposition: How the Thai Military’s Political Astroturfing Campaigns Frame the Political Establishment and their Democratic Rivals

Framing is a key process in which government elites demonstrate political power and influence over the public. In late 2020, Twitter publicly disclosed over 20,000 tweets from 926 accounts that were suspiciously linked to the Royal Thai Army (RTA). The revelation substantiated an opposition lawmaker’s allegations that the Royal Thai Army (RTA) had manipulated its platform to wage state-backed information campaigns aimed at influencing public opinions in favor of the regime vis-à-vis the political opposition. Central to the army’s digital deception tactics are the so-called “sockpuppets,” which are fake online identities created to interact with users on social media networks.” In Russian and Chinese contexts, sockpuppets have been deployed for a variety of purposes, from promoting pro-regime narratives to harassing dissidents to exploiting social divisions of the adversarial nation-states. Focusing on a subset of Twitter’s dataset, this article sheds light on how Thai armylinked sockpuppets aim to shape online public debate. Specifically, it illustrates how these entities disseminate propaganda messages and packages them in “frames” that defend and glorify the military and the political establishment while demonizing pro-democracy political parties, activists, and online dissidents. Through quantitative and qualitative content analysis of 14,431 tweets (out of the total of 21,385 tweets in the takedown) in February 2020, this article provides a glimpse into how RTA-linked sockpuppets seek to provide false impressions of public support for the army and political establishment. The significance of this chosen time frame cannot be overstated: it accounts for one third of the total tweets in the dataset. Preliminary findings indicate that Thai army-linked sockpuppets seek reinforce partisan identities in Thai politics instead of engaging in policy-related debates. On the one hand, they heavily cheerlead the military and the Prayut administration by retweeting and commenting on content that contribute to the positive framing of their images and roles in Thai society. On the other hand, they devalue the democratic opposition, particularly the progressive Future Forward Party, by retweeting negative content and hurling abusive comments that magnify the opposition’s image as an undesirable political actor that creates problems and inconveniences for the society. These framing tactics indicate an increasingly polarized political climate in Thailand and a sense of tribalism not just around nationalist ideology but also around truth claims.