When Thai journalist and free speech advocate Pravit Rojanaphruk joined Twitter in 2011, the social media platform was for him just a home for a few academics and politicians arguing with each other.
But over the next decade—along with Thailand’s pro-democracy and monarchical reform movement—young people and activists flocked to Twitter to organize, share information, and exchange protest tactics across borders. Pravit himself increasingly turned to his 85,000 followers to speak out about facing accusations of forced resignation and rebellion over criticism of the government.
“A voice has been given to many people who have been voiceless. Many used a pen name, so they feel much more comfortable,” says Pravit. “For the last three or four years, Twitter has been the plug that drives the agenda.”
Pravit and other journalists and activists across Southeast Asia fear that could soon change. Since buying the site last month, mercurial tech entrepreneur Elon Musk has cut about half the company’s staff, proposed an $8-a-month payment system to gain a verified account and raised alarms about the spread of misinformation and hate speech.
The site’s future has sparked a unique conversation in parts of Asia, where criticizing governments or royal figures can lead to lengthy prison sentences and activists have few public venues to speak out anonymously.
“The things that activists rely on to communicate through social media, like community moderation, security and so on, often depend on a few people running the site,” said a young activist from Singapore, who asked to remain anonymous and uses Twitter to quickly gather and share information difficult to find elsewhere. “The whole site can change as they wish.”
Key concerns include whether Twitter will make users de-anonymize their accounts and how it will handle requests from authoritarian regimes to hand over user information, as well as government-linked disinformation campaigns.
Kirsten Han, a Singaporean activist who tweets anti-death penalty content and promotes a newsletter covering taboo topics to nearly 30,000 followers. wrote in a recent one yarn that easing moderation could not only further the spread of misinformation, but also give “governments an excuse to justify passing more laws, enforcing more regulations, and generally giving themselves more power to further regulate and suppress expression on the Internet”.
“What was fueled on Twitter became true on the street”
Pro-government or royal bot accounts flooded Twitter during Thailand’s 2020 protests and Malaysia’s 2018 election, with users in Cambodia, Vietnam and Myanmar reporting similar phenomena as far back as five years ago.
Activists have responded by mass reporting the accounts and launching their own hashtag campaigns. In the early days of Myanmar’s 2021 coup, a flood of anonymous new users tweeting #HeartheVoiceofMyanmar and #SaveMyanmar gathered millions of supporters on the site. In Cambodia, exiled opposition leaders announced their efforts to return home on Twitter, while in Thailand, #WhyDoWeNeedAKing was tweeted more than a million times amid protests.
More importantly, activists say, the platform helped Asian protesters build solidarity between nations. The Milk Tea Alliance – an online democracy campaign born around the 2020 Hong Kong and Thai uprisings – discovered the shared experiences of young people and encouraged them to take to the streets, recalls Netiwit Chotiphatphaisal, a Thai activist and leader of the Milk Tea Alliance, whose Twitter account has more. than 175,000 followers.
“I tweeted before the 2020 youth uprising, ‘Is it enough to be successful doing hashtag campaigns?’ We should look at Hong Kong and others – this should be the means not the end, and we should take to the streets to protest,” says Netiwit. “And finally what was hyped on Twitter became real on the street.”
“I’ve seen the madness of Elon Musk,” he adds. “I fear the big tech companies trying to control [Twitter] … We have to have internet for people.”
Others aren’t sure what to think. Teeranai Charuvastra, vice president of the Thai Journalists Association, has never been impressed with Twitter’s handling of misinformation. But, he says, “I’m afraid it could go from bad to worse. Maybe it’ll just stay bad, but to be honest, I don’t see how it’s going to go from bad to good.”
