Cheerleading Without Fans: A Low-Impact Domestic Information Operation by the Royal Thai Army
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- On October 8, 2020, Twitter announced the takedown of 926 accounts targeting Thai Twitter users in a domestic information operation. Twitter attributed these accounts to the Royal Thai Army and shared the accounts with the Stanford Internet Observatory on September 24, 2020. Of the 926 accounts, only 455 actively tweeted, producing a total of 21,385 tweets in the takedown. The network was used primarily to promote pro-government and pro-military positions and accounts on Twitter and to attack political opposition, particularly the Future Forward Party and Move Forward Party (FFP and MFP, respectively). This was a coordinated but low-impact operation: most accounts had no followers and the majority of tweets received no engagement (calculated as the sum of likes, replies, retweets, and quote retweets). This might be due in part to the operation’s limited duration: most of the accounts were created in January 2020 and the network largely stopped tweeting by March 2, 2020. Activity was heavily concentrated in February 2020 with notable spikes around the Korat shooting, a mass shooting in which a soldier killed 30 people, and the dissolution of the FFP. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time a social media company has suspended a network of accounts linked to the Royal Thai Army. It is the first instance of Twitter including activity originating in Thailand in its state-backed information operations archive. However, it is not the first time the military has been accused of running information operations. In February 2020, the Future Forward Party accused the Prime Minister and Minister of Defense of conducting information operations with the aim of attacking opposition candidates on Facebook. A series of leaked documents and interviews with a whistleblower from the Army in early 2020 support this account, and suggest that the information operations began prior to the 2019 elections. The whistleblower who came forward was disillusioned that taxpayer dollars were used to sow discord and hatred online. The alleged operation on Facebook supported the Army, commented negatively on opposition members’ Facebook Pages, and spread false information and graphics attacking political opposition members. Although we have no indication as to whether this Twitter takedown is linked to the Facebook information operation previously reported, the Twitter takedown dataset reveals similar tactics and aims, especially a reliance on posts that promote the Army and critique opposition party members.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date modified | December 5, 2022 |
| Publication date | January 5, 2022; October 8, 2020 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Goldstein, Josh A. |
|---|---|
| Author | Sinpeng, Aim |
| Author | Bush, Daniel |
| Author | Ewald, Ross |
| Author | John, Jennifer |
| Contributor | Thiel, David |
Subjects
| Subject | Twitter, takedown |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
| Genre | Report |
Bibliographic information
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- User agrees that, where applicable, content will not be used to identify or to otherwise infringe the privacy or confidentiality rights of individuals. Content distributed via the Stanford Digital Repository may be subject to additional license and use restrictions applied by the depositor.
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- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial No Derivatives 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC-ND).
Preferred citation
- Preferred citation
- Goldstein, J., Sinpeng, A., Bush, D., Ewald, R., and John, J. (2020). Cheerleading Without Fans: A Low-Impact Domestic Information Operation by the Royal Thai Army. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at https://purl.stanford.edu/ym245nv3149
Collection
Stanford Internet Observatory, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
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- internetobservatory@stanford.edu
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