Credibility of the Official COVID Communication in Thailand: When People Stop Believing the Government

Abstract

One of the challenges of health communication during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has been maintaining the credibility of official sources of information. Netizens constantly questioned the authorities’ messaging for inconsistencies in official narratives, which led to the dissemination of what came to called fake news that just happened to occasionally to be true. COVID skepticism affected countries around the world including Thailand, where social media users were regularly suspicious of the government narratives presented to the general public. The question arose of how people can factcheck official messaging that appears to be questionable, and the subject remains an issue more than 2 years later: Who should be the ultimate arbiter of truth in the COVID debate, and when does one turn to this arbiter? This paper follows Thailand social media discourse in an examination of discursive frames with the aim of identifying the correlations between public approval of Thai government disease control efforts and public skepticism of the official messages. The analysis demonstrates that the Thai public was generally accepting of the government’s messaging as long as the government’s efforts generally appeared to be successful but that public skepticism increased as approval of government actions decreased. Netizens in Thailand turned to Western sources of information such as the World Health Organization and the US Centers for Disease Control in searches for accurate information. This example of the Thai public’s COVID-19 discourse during the pandemic illustrates how credibility can be a function of approval rather than of truthfulness and transparency.