Nationalist zeal & AI slop fueled the Thai-Cambodia conflict

On a positive note, let's hope the ceasefire holds.

Although conflicts around the world are defined by lack of information, competing narratives and nationalist propaganda, the Thai-Cambodia fighting this week has been uniformly horrendous on each of these fronts. We’ll give a quick summary before diving into the online maelstrom.

First, here’s what’s going on:

The Cambodia-Thailand truce appears to be holding — for now — despite Thailand initially accusing Cambodia of violating the ceasefire shortly after it took effect. However, on Wednesday, Cambodia accused Thailand of detaining around 20 soldiers; reports suggest it’s possible two of them are dead. Cambodia claims the detentions came after Thai soldiers agreed to discuss the ceasefire informally at the An Ses checkpoint in Preah Vihear. When other Thai soldiers appeared, they called for a group photo, and then surrounded the group of Cambodians and detained them.

In a completely different take on these events, Thailand claims the detentions occurred following Cambodian firing into Thai territory. As soon as Thailand responded and cleared Cambodian positions, Thailand says the soldiers surrendered peacefully. There is talk of the soldiers being released Thursday.

Next up is a meeting of the general border committee in Cambodia on August 4. But there’s no clear information on military positions currently held or lost by either side — Thailand claims it held/gained in all heavy battle zones; Cambodia refutes this — how many soldiers and people were killed/injured on the Cambodian side — Cambodia has reported no new deaths since the five it announced on Saturday morning — as well whether there are other prisoners of war on either side and their wellbeing. These are not small facts!

This lack of clear information has meanwhile been supercharged online by artificial intelligence and social media to project self-serving narratives, dismiss anything seemingly negative about the other side and intentionally spread misinformation.

Kouprey has seen this content originating from governments, influencers, unsuspecting citizens, and consisting of everything from fake news to misleading images to extremely slanted journalism. Here we go.

On fake news, AI slop, and the influencer machine:

On Tuesday, acting Thai PM Phumtham Wechayachai himself warned citizens against disinformation — which he called “Cambodia’s political tactics” — and encouraged them to follow official Thai government sources only. Meanwhile, Cambodia’s Ministry of National Defense spokesperson Maly Socheata accused Thailand of a coordinated disinformation campaign, claiming that “they don’t want the truth to reach the people.” Both countries also separately warned their social media users against spreading hatred or inciting violence (to little avail).

How did we get here? Let’s start with fake news, which has — despite Cambodia’s warnings to “verify information” — been peddled by the highest levels of the ruling elite. On Monday, PM Hun Manet’s wife, Pich Chanmony, reposted several images to Facebook after a 7 a.m. press conference during which the government claimed Thailand had used “poison gas.” One image was reposted from Ministry of Economy and Finance official Meas Soksensan.

Three different AI review sites told Kouprey what any human can guess with their own eyeballs, which is “high confidence” or over 90% chance that the lefthand image is AI-generated. The righthand image originates from Reuters coverage of the Los Angeles Palisades fire in January (link to the full gallery here):

Thailand fought back against the accusation of poison gas and Chanmony’s posts, saying that Thailand has never used chemical weapons “under any circumstances” and claiming Cambodia has “resorted to the strategic use of disinformation in an attempt to fabricate legitimacy in the eyes of the international community.”

Meanwhile, Cambodian and Thai officials traded similar accusations and denials over the Unesco site Preah Vihear temple, which Cambodia says was “destroyed” by Thai shelling, a characterization Thailand insists is a “distortion of facts.” The tit-for-tat over Ta Krabey temple has been even more confusing.

In each of these cases, no independent sources have yet been able to verify what’s happening. And even when both governments are invested in sharing legitimate, daresay factual information, they are doing it badly.

This leaves a central part of the information ecosystem up to influencers and pay-to-play “news” accounts that share jumped-up nationalist narratives and AI images. (Kouprey will not link to these accounts because we don’t care to target, or provide views to, any specific person). But a scroll back through Chanmony’s and other government officials’ pages shows reposts from Khmer, Khmer American and white expat influencers spewing government narratives, while “news sources” such as DAP have consistently posted outlandish misinformation or been called out for fake news — and then proceeded to continue reporting unverified information as truth.

A few lowlights reviewed by Kouprey this week include an Instagram influencer sharing manipulated photos of Preah Vihear temple while sobbing theatrically; AI images of displaced Cambodians flooding Instagram along with the hashtags #JusticeForCambodia and #CambodiaSelfDefend; an influencer with more than 1.5 million followers claiming Thailand has done “all this to a peace-loving neighbor,” and influencers sharing the AI “poison smoke” images with total sincerity. This content is often delivered from a similar script and frames Thailand as entirely aggressive and Cambodia as entirely peaceful, weak, and poor, which also plays into orientalist tropes pushed by white influencers defending Cambodia as a “gentle” and “smiling” people.

Of course, some of this reflects the real feelings people have for their country and a reluctance to return to conflict and war. Cambodia is smaller and militarily weaker, and the intergenerational trauma from the Khmer Rouge genocide runs deep — especially with few meaningful national reconciliation efforts.

But these influencer-ified narratives neglect how this conflict stewed throughout weeks of tit-for-tat and exploded after former prime minister Hun Sen almost singlehandedly toppled Thailand’s delicate ruling coalition (which Thailand did not take lightly). The question posed by social media users in viral videos — “What does Cambodia have to gain in attacking Thailand?” — would be an excellent one to ask Hun Sen, who has fanned the flames of the conflict and projected himself as the only one to take on the Thai military. All of this is to the detriment of Cambodia’s very reasonable response to bring the border conflict to the International Court of Justice after one of its soldiers was killed on May 28.

It’s not that influencers should be expected to subvert these narratives. The problem is that they have no competition from independent media or even other influencers, because the regime has worked hard to silence its critics. Influencers and journalists have repeated the line that the international media has sided with Thailand in the conflict; that because they were based in Bangkok they didn’t care about Cambodian voices — or worse, that the mere presence of a Thai byline in an Associate Press or Reuters article meant the article was untrustworthy.

And even when independent journalists in Cambodia attempted to report near the front lines, they were detained by police and prevented from doing their jobs. If we want better coverage of Cambodia on the global stage, it starts from having vibrant local media that can report and track these issues with a critical lens, which then feeds into international stories. The coalition of voices complaining about the current lack of information — which has even included members of the ruling party — needs to first speak up when journalists are arrested or imprisoned for questioning government narratives, or when publications are shut down over the flimsiest of reasons.

A review of Thai social media — with which Kouprey is less familiar, so will receive less airtime here — showed similar dynamics: A slew of bizarre AI-generated carousels with soldiers standing in the shape of a heart or holding up a lit-up, 3D map of Thailand; racist and anti-poor stereotypes of Cambodian soldiers and workers, and calls for Cambodian migrants to be expelled from the country.

Thailand has also seen hashtag campaigns emerge on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram that became calling cards for the conflict’s origin: #CambodiaOpenedFire and #ไทยนี้รักสงบแต่ถึงรบไม่ขลาด, which is a line from Thailand’s national anthem and translates, in context, to “Thais love peace but aren’t afraid to defend their country.” Both grew from zero to hundreds of thousands of shares on July 24, the day fighting broke out, according to Kouprey analysis via social media company Talkwalker, matching one another hour-by-hour before sharply dropping off. They reemerged Tuesday, when #CambodiaOpenedFire saw almost 1 million shares in an hour and #TruthFromThailand caught fire in reference to Cambodia’s alleged ceasefire violation, hitting 1.7 million mentions in an hour.

The feedback loop is thus cemented: Government officials proffer at best unverified and at worst false narratives, which are then regurgitated by influencers and regular social media users, which are then re-regurgitated by government officials, which are then re-re-regurgitated — you get the point. And the keyboard warriors roar.

One Thai influencer summed up the situation pretty well in a caption that could also be a decent pop hook: “We both just wanted revenge but believe me that we should stop it.”

Still, journalists, human rights folks and analysts are working hard to verify and deliver information. Here’s a few we particularly liked:

— Phoung Vantha’s story about Cambodian evacuees who ran from shelling and are desperate to avoid flat-out war, for Nikkei Asia.

— Coby Hobbs’ interview with a soldier awaiting surgery for shrapnel for Al Jazeera, as well as AJ’s roundup of photos from evacuation centers.

— This video from a Thai hospital hit by Cambodian shelling, from Tian Macleod Ji at the Associated Press.

— Ken Lohatepanont’s measured Substack take on the Shinawatra-Hun feud.

And one quick point: Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has announced that the US has reached a trade deal with Cambodia (and a neighboring country that shall-not-be-named) but we have seen no details about the topline tariff rate on Cambodian exports to the U.S. More on that next week.

See you soon!