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Anonymously and Creatively Criticizing the King:

How the Young use Twitter to challenge Thailand’s most untouchable status quo

Wirada Saelim 12846988 Master’s Thesis

Graduate School of Communication, Master’s programme Communication Science

Supervisor: Mark Boukes

Abstract

Facing the violation of freedom of expression under the military-led government, the young generation has nevertheless actively joined Thailand’s political landscape. Twitter is, so far, a popular social media site used to express political opinions, even including dissent towards the monarchy. Focusing on how communicative transformation caused by convergent technologies has enabled young Thai citizens to criticize the monarchy—risking fifteen-year jail term under the lese-majeste law—this study uses a qualitative content analysis method to explore trending hashtags related to royal issues from national election to Covid-19 crisis. This study finds that the technologically-enabled sphere on Twitter is crucial to Thailand’s democratization as it allows young citizens to achieve political goals through anonymously and creatively interacting with like-minded people, mobilizing and advocating democracy, setting agenda, and expressing dissent with coded language.

Keywords: Thailand, monarchy, youth political participation, social media, authoritarian, convergent technologies, public sphere, political expression

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Introduction

In Thailand, one important question has remained unanswered. Under the Democratic Regime of Government with the King as Head of the State, who does the sovereignty belong to? The king or the people? This ambiguity is argued to be at “the heart of Thai political malaise” (Tejapira, 2016, p. 228) that has never been directly discussed in the public sphere: Due to the lese-majeste law, known as Article 112 of Thailand's criminal code, the royal family is protected from criticism. It is considered the strictest lese-majeste law in the world with a harsh jail term from three to fifteen years (BBC, 2017). The prosecution of this law is supported by the notion of “defending the monarchy, the center of Thai people’s hearts,” which has been embedded in Thai culture and identity by past and present military dictatorships (Farrelly, 2016).

Self-censorship not only occurs among Thai citizens and journalists, Fong (2009) points out that there has also been a self-censorship among Thai and international scholars due to the enforcement of the law. Some Thai academics have sought asylum after being charged with Article 112. The same goes to international media such as BBC journalist Jonathan Head, who was accused of criticizing the monarchy by a Thai police officer (MacKinnon, 2008). Obviously being restricted in the ability to freely express themselves too, young citizens have moved to the digital sphere to engage in issues related to the monarchy risking being prosecuted by the state. After five years under the military government led by the National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO) that seized the power from then-elected government in the 2014-coup, the young generation has actively participated in contemporary Thai politics in both offline and online spheres, especially the latter. Twitter is, so far, the most prevalent platform utilized by the young users since the first national election in March 2019. Yet, much remains to be understood about how this platform is used to express their political ideas under the condition of a repressive regime.

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Since the emergence of convergent technologies has profoundly changed the way citizens engage in politics (Papacharissi, 2010), scholars tried to understand and find meanings of the new forms of civic vernacular and political expression of youth in democratic societies (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012; Graham et al., 2015). Although some authoritarian regimes like China and Egypt have adjusted to new information tools for their survival by restricting online political participation (Jiang, 2010; He & Warren, 2011; Lynch, 2011; Iskandar, 2019), research in these regimes has revealed that civic empowerment and political mobilization may still be afforded by the use of social media (Douai & Nofal, 2012; Papacharissi, 2010; 2016). In order to better understand the democratizing influence of social media, what is required is a methodological approach that is more open and interpretative, and that “recognizes the influence of social diversity, inequality and cultural difference as important sources of power influencing democratic innovation” (Loader & Mercea, 2011, p. 760).

Considering that still little is known about the ways through which young citizens in non-democratic countries use social media for everyday forms of political engagement (Lee, 2018), the current study hopes to shed more light on this phenomenon. This study is aimed to better understand how communicative transformation caused by social media has enabled young Thai citizens to engage in taboo topics of the monarchy. Moreover, it scrutinizes how they make use of the technologically-enabled sphere to negotiate their place and challenge the most untouchable status quo amidst the country’s struggles towards democratization.

Theoretical Background

21st Century Citizenship: New Political Vernacular in ‘Merged’ Spheres

The 18th century coffeehouses described in Habermas’s theory of the public sphere have been replaced by a mediatized public sphere due to the advent of mass-circulation newspaper and

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broadcasting media halfway the 20th century (Habermas, 1989 as cited in Bruns & Highfield, 2016). This notion has become even more complicated in the time of the Internet with the proliferation of social media platforms (Bruns and Highfield, 2016; Siapera and Mohty, 2020) as the quality of deliberation on cyberspace does often not reach the requirements of the model (Dahlberg, 2006). New models are needed to better understand how civic engagement and political participation have been transformed and challenged by convergent technologies (Papacharissi, 2010; Loader & Mercea, 2011; Brun & Highfield, 2016). These new lenses will help to transcend disengaged versus engaged paradigms due to a concern about declining in traditional forms of political participation (Ekman & Amnå, 2012).

Structural fragmentation, individualization, and pressures of economic globalization are argued to be causes of breakdowns in identifiable political memberships and institutional loyalty in many economically-developed democracies (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012). Feeling powerless and dissatisfied with the civic environments, citizens practice new civic activities through their smartphones, the private realm where they may feel more secure and experience more autonomy and flexibility to express themselves (Papacharissi, 2010). As technological affordances have blurred the distinct line between ‘private’ and ‘public,’ ‘formal’ and ‘informal,’ ‘personal’ and ‘political,’ new civic habits have emerged — which are different than those conventionally expected from citizens in traditional models of the public sphere (Papacharissi, 2010; Bennett and Segerberg, 2012). Papacharissi (2010) argues that increased individualism, autonomy, and self-expression have turned citizens from a deliberative mode (a crucial aspect according to Habermas) to a monitorial mode: Monitorial citizens are defensive rather than proactive, reactive rather than consistently active, multitasking while remaining informed. Employing technology to join fluid, issues-based group politics from a self-determined sphere, “monitorial citizens are capable of action, but they are also calculative of the risk associated with political action” (Papacharissi, 2010,

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p. 101). Additionally, Bennett and colleagues posit that citizens nowadays especially the young generation are unlikely to uphold the ‘Dutiful Citizenship’ in which more conventional forms of civic engagement (e.g., voting, joining political groups, and consuming information from authoritative sources) are considered a duty and obligation. Instead, new technologies are used to socialize with peer networks in everyday life. Accordingly, ‘Actualizing Citizens’ still engage with politics and organize civic action to maximize individual expression (Bennett et al., 2009; Bennett, et al., 2010; 2011), but in alternative ways.

Examples are countless: debating with strangers about government’s decision on Twitter during the work break; sharing political content on their news feeds with friends while lying in bed before sleeping; changing a profile picture with the same message to show solidarity supporting social movements; asking friends to support fundraising projects available on Facebook on one’s birthday. As users move from interpersonal to public topics, from one Twitter post to the next, everyday social interaction on social media between ‘peers’ and ‘public’ are intertwined (Bruns & Highfield, 2016). Focusing more on “an expression of personal hopes, lifestyles, and grievances” (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012, p. 743), citizens—especially the young generation— engage meaningfully in civic activities from their private sphere that allows individualized and personalized styles of communication making today’s civic forms different from those in the past (Papacharissi, 2010).

Connective Actions and Participatory Politics on Twitter

Youth are generally seen as early-adopters, who deploy new communication technologies to develop their civic identity and engage in politics through the use of creative digital artifacts (Kahne et al., 2015; Kligler-Vilenchik & Literat, 2018). Young citizens in western societies have been shown to use social media for sharing information and mobilization, redefining political actions and political spaces (Vromen et al., 2015, p. 80). It is in virtual spaces where they engage

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with each other to show “a personalized, symbolic solidarity with political issues” (Vromen et al., 2016, p. 17). Not only disseminating political messages, social media have proven effective for calls-to-action without relying on traditional member-based institutions but through “connective actions” (Bennett et al., 2010; Bennett & Segerberg, 2012).

Approaching technology as context, Bennett and Segerberg (2012) argue that new technologies can foster growth and stabilization of social movement organizations (SMO) in looser network structures compared to the traditional SMO form. ‘Sharing’ is the essential element that hold these organizationally-enabled networks together. To illustrate, the transnational Occupy movements, the Indignados in Spain, and the Five Star Movement in Italy are argued to be strong evidence of online connective action making a serious societal impact (Vromen et al., 2015). More recently, the cases of #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo demonstrated how the use of hashtags can organize discursive online protests (Zeng, 2020). Moreover, Vigil-Hayes et al. (2017) find political connective actions between Native American advocates and their followers who connect though content dissemination by using the #indigenous-hashtag as mechanism.

Outside of the western context, it can be argued that similar connective actions occurred within the Twitter Thailand phenomenon. For instance, students from at least 36 universities throughout the country generated hashtags for on-ground flash mobs organized to protest against the military-led government. Moreover, Twitter and Facebook were crucial platforms that allowed the young users to help fundraising for a 20-year-old man who was arrested by the police for tweeting ‘inappropriate information’ about the monarchy. It took only one night to raise enough money to release him on bail without any mainstream media having reported about the incident.

Such movements and engagement on social media platforms can be understood as “participatory politics”, which was conceptualized by Kahne et al. (2015) as “interactive, peer-based acts through which individuals and groups seek to exert both voice and influence on issues

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of public concern” (p. 3). In participatory politics facilitated by new media, young citizens as members in loose online communities can determine their own public agenda and investigate public issues by analyzing information from various sources as well as (fact-)checking the accuracy of information circulated by elite institutions. Users discuss among peers about their views on public issues they are concerned about and provide feedback to political leaders on the decisions that are made (Kahne et al., 2015). Not only circulating and forwarding information, they also produce original content with political messages. Lastly, participatory members of online communities can help each other to accomplish civic or political goals (Kahne et al., 2015), which corresponds with research showing that there is a strong correlation between online and off-line forms of engagement (Boulianne & Theocharis, 2020).

The notion of participatory politics and how youths expressively engage in politics on social media are compatible with the concept of “affective publics” termed by Papacharissi (2016) when studying how people participated in public issues on Twitter. Looking at each hashtag as “a community of interest” or ad hoc publics (Bruns & Burgess, 2011), people who joined #egypt movement during the Arab Spring uprising in 2011 and #ows during the Occupy Wall Street movement were collaboratively telling their stories with their own preferred modes of expression (Papacharissi, 2016). Driven by affect or sentiment, Twitter is an ambient and always-on broadcast platform that enables collaborative story-writing, collaborative filtering, and news reporting with retweeting tool as the way to reinforce solidarity (Papacharissi, 2016). Moreover, flexibility of Twitter to form new hashtag communities without restriction and the fact that users can interact with one another without having to be in the following network created a horizontal and bottom-up communicative form of communication, which makes the Twittersphere challenging for institutional actors to dominate the conversation (Bruns & Burgess, 2011, p. 7). As Twitter has

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been a popular platform among young Thai citizens to engage in sensitive issues related to the monarchy and to perform connective actions, this study asks:

RQ1: In what ways have young Thai citizens utilized Twitter to engage in the issues related to the monarchy?

Creative Dissent in Counter-publics: Digital Political Expression under Repressive Regimes

It has been argued that citizens feel more powerful negotiating their place in democracy through a technologically-enabled private sphere; thus, “this retreat to private sphere is an act of dissent, and as such is a political act” (Papacharissi, 2010, p. 24). In China, for example, social media platforms have become an ideological and political battleground between different actors and it is full of ironies, ambivalence, and impurities (Yang, 2014). Similarly, Reuter and Szakonyi (2013) argued that online social networks increased public awareness of electoral fraud in the Russia context. It can be argued that citizens under repressive regimes are deploying social media platforms with various practices to creating so-called “counter publics” to politically express their dissent towards the status quo (Lee, 2018). A construct originally developed in response to the feminist movement, counter publics are created by members of inferior social groups that “invent and circulate counter discourses to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs” (Fraser, 1990, p. 67) against the dominant public’s norm that excludes them.

Focusing on how political meaning is expressed in digital spheres, creativity in youth political expression has been studied in the context of advanced democratic societies to understand new ways of political participation that lie underneath informal and personal acts (Vromen et al., 2015; 2016; Kligler-Vilenchik &Literat, 2018; Penney, 2019). Social media platforms provide youth in democratic societies with different elements to “openly” communicate about politics with

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their friends through their preferred modes of expression in ‘everyday political talk’ (Kligler-Vilenchik & Literat, 2019). Studies in repressive regimes, as Thailand still is, in contrast focus on different functions of such forms of expression. Various tactics have been used to navigate the danger that comes from government censorship or—even worse—prosecution by the state for expressing dissent (Davis and Jurgenson, 2014; Vromen et al., 2016; Lee, 2018; Iskandar, 2019). One ways is with humor, such as satire and parody, which has always been a popular instrument used by citizens in repressive regimes as it is argued to be a form that can survive authoritarian censorship and mobilize resistance due to its implicitness and potential to spread widely (Shao and Liu, 2018). Previous research has demonstrated how young Chinese citizens used memes and satire to criticize the government and status quo, despite the state regulation under Xi Jinping’s regime (Szablewicz, 2014; Repnikova, 2018). Similarly in Russia, online media, such as social networking platforms and non-professional individual blogs have challenged the state hegemony with a popular parody microblogging as criticism (Denisova, 2017). Young citizens in Singapore and Vietnam—where mainstream media are seen as conservative and supportive of the government— are engaging in public discourse regarding government policy with the use of remix culture and memetic content (Sharbaugh & Nguyen, 2014; Sreekumar and Vadrevu, 2018). Given the same conditions of a limited freedom to express oneself freely, humor could also be a viable way for young Thai citizens to criticize the monarchy. Besides humor, more subtle tactics are also used in some repressive countries. In Cambodia, young citizens have been found to create multi-layer messages targeted at an in-group audience (Lee, 2018). This practice is in line with the concept of “hidden scripts” used to “characterize discourse that takes place ‘offstage,’ beyond direct observation by powerholders” (Scott, 1990, p. 4).

The most active young citizens who took part in the Arab Spring uprising in 2011(Douai and Nofal, 2012, Papacharissi, 2016)—and actively demonstrated the power of counter-publics to

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mobilize political participation—have been in exile, imprisoned, and charged (Iskandar, 2019). Amid low political participation in traditional forms among young Egyptians who feel more at risk than ever, Iskandar (2019) argues that young citizens are still not defeated by the regime as they are actively spreading jokes, satirical memes, and humorous content on social media to discredit the government. The significance of these forms of political expression and participation, “however, is real, as the events of 2010 and 2011 showed” (Iskandar, 2019, p. 155).

Although without strict and advanced internet censorship infrastructures like other authoritarian regimes (Lee, 2018), Thai citizens still do not enjoy freedom of expression. Similar to Egypt, pro-democracy young Thais have retreated and expressed political dissent in digital spheres where individual autonomy is afforded since street demonstration is no longer a safe action due to repeated freedom of expression violations after the 2014 military coup. Social media users, however, also face the same risk of being prosecuted especially when it comes to issues related to the monarchy. Given the unique circumstances in the Thai context (i.e. harsh lese-majeste law and social norms that one is expected to love and pay loyalty to the monarchy), this study asks:

RQ2: What communicative strategies and tactics are used to express dissent towards the monarchy by Thai Twitter users?

From #WeGrownupsCanVoteForOurselves to #WhyDoWeNeedaKing: Twitter Thailand phenomenon

Freedom of expression and political activities in Thailand under the oppressive junta government have been severely violated since the 2014 coup. When it comes to criticism on the role of the monarchy in Thai politics, the mainstream media are practicing self-censorship due to the fear of the lese-majeste law. However, more and more people, especially the young generation can access alternative discourses and discuss about the royal issues in the online sphere particularly

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on Twitter. Several hashtags have been generated that followed real-world offline political situations since the national election in 2019. This section explains the hashtags that were created by young Thai users to engage in five incidents related to the monarchy in chronological order. These hashtags were all No.1 trending on Twitter Thailand at a certain moment.

The first hashtag is #โตแล้วเลือกเองได้ which means ‘we grown-ups can vote for ourselves.’ Soaring number one of Thailand trends on Twitter on the eve before the national election in March 2019, it was a response to the recently-crowned King Vajiralongkorn who released the royal announcement to support “good people” to rule Thailand (Prachatai, 2019). This announcement was broadcast on every channel throughout the country on that night.

Following the first hashtag, the second hashtag, #ขบวนเสด็จ or ‘Royal Motorcade,’ was trending on Twitter Thailand from October 2019 and sometimes popped up again throughout January 2020. It was used to express dissent about how motorcades affect every-day life: Police regularly closed roads to general traffic by stopping cars in both travel directions, so the royal family could commute on. Later in January 2020, King Vajiralongkorn made a royal announcement expressing his concern about how the motorcades affect citizens and gave police the procedure to close fewer roads (Kishimoto, 2020). Thai mainstream media never reported about the opinions of Twitter users, but did report the King’s announcement.

The third hashtag was created in response to the arrest of 20-year-old man, a Twitter user with an anonymous account who tweeted information about the Thai monarchy. On 19 February 2020, he was identified and arrested by the police. Instead of the lese-majeste law, he was charged with violating Section 14 of the Computer Crime Act, which bans importing information that threatens “national security”. Thai Lawyer for Human Rights, the non-profit organization who followed the case and helped the 20-year-old Twitter user reported that the police printed tweets from his account and asked him to verify account ownership. After that, he was forced to give the

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account password to the officers. This is the first time that an ordinary citizen, using an anonymous account on Twitter, was charged for tweeting about the monarchy. Subsequently, #saveนิรนาม (#saveAnonymous) which means to help free the account owner, was trending topic. Only 27 hours after the arrest was informed on social media, Thai netizens (both on Facebook and Twitter) raised two million baht (€57,000) for the family to have him released on bail.

Just two days after this arrest of ‘Anonymous’1, Thailand’s Constitutional Court dissolved the Future Forward Party. It was the new and progressive political party that had entered Thai politics for the national election in 2019 and was hugely popular among the young generation. This incident led to flash mobs organized by students from at least 36 universities throughout the country. Twitter was actively and mainly used as a platform for people who were at the scene and for those who wanted to virtually follow the situation. Each of the 36 demonstrations had its own hashtag name. This study explores two of these hashtags (#เสาหลักจะไม่หักอีกต่อไป and #ธรรมศาสตร ์

และการชุมนุม), which were trending on Twitter in that period of time. This is the first time after the military coup in 2014 that a large number of young citizens politically participated in the offline sphere to explicitly express their discontent towards the injustice in politics. Although the bigger picture was about young citizens asking for democratic government, there were some topics of the monarchy clearly involved too. Responding to the phenomenon, the Prime Minister of Thailand (Prayut Chan-o-cha) stated in Parliament that he must warn the students to not insult the monarchy in the movements, otherwise they would be prosecuted according to the law.

The last hashtag examined in this study is #กษัตริย ์มีไว้ท าไม (#WhyDoWeNeedaKing?) created by the prominent Thai monarchy critic and scholar who has been in exile since being charged with the lese-majeste law, Somsak Jeamteerasakul. He created this hashtag while sharing information about King Vajiralongkorn flying his own jet in Germany during Coronavirus crisis

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in March 2020. More than one million tweets used this hashtag to criticize the king’s behaviors especially regarding the report by international media revealing that King Vajiralonkorn partied with 20 women in the four-star hotel in Germany, despite the lockdown policy of German government in which hotels were asked to close during the pandemic (Ng, 2020). The main dissent expressed by the young citizens is how the king could spend people’s tax for his own pleasure instead of helping Thai citizens who are financially hit hard during Covid-19 crisis. After a year of active engagement on royal issues, the name of this hashtag has been the most explicit ever ranked as top trend on Twitter Thailand. To enrich the understanding of how the communicative transformation caused by social media has enabled citizens to express their dissent and criticize sensitive political issues, this study qualitatively explores the use of the Thai hashtags explained above.

Method

Investigating the nature of meaningful themes, ideas, beliefs, and practices from the way young citizens use Twitter to express their dissent towards the Thai monarchy, qualitative content analysis is employed in this study (David & Sutton, 2011, p. 324). For this study, five datasets over a year period are found enough to reach saturation of understanding the meanings and patterns of common practices in the Twitter Thailand Phenomenon.

Data Collection

Considering Twitter as the source, there are two types of content generated on this microblogging platform: user-generated content (UGC) and user-selected content (USC) (Neuendorf, 2002). This study examines relevant data from both types: data originally created by Twitter users and content from external sources such as links, pictures, and videos shared by the Twitter users. Using Twitter’s Advanced Search-function, five data sets of 1,832 tweets are manually collected from the ‘Top Tweets’-section of each relevant hashtag described earlier.

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According to Twitter, ‘Top Tweets’ are the most relevant results for one’s search. Therefore, manually collecting data from ‘Top Tweets’ could help researchers avoid analyzing spams (Kim et al., 2013) and irrelevant data generated by user behavior (Neuendorf, 2002). Besides totally-irrelevant data, tweets from scholars, journalists, governmental and other institutions—both national and international—are also excluded. This study focuses on ordinary people for “studying ordinary communication can offer important information about the state of the public sphere and identify any signs for any mobilization or conversely for demobilization.” (Siapera and Mohty, 2020, p. 494). Apart from relevance as a crucial reason, the data available on ‘Top Tweets’ timeline are limited unlike ‘Latest’ section that presents all data tweeted within the selected time frames including the new tweets that keep updating. This sampling method, thus, makes the population size manageable for manual collecting and coding (Kim et al., 2018). In total, 1,832 tweets from five datasets, including replies, are collected from specific periods mostly based on the times the chosen hashtags were trending (see Table 1 for details).

Table 1. Details of Datasets collected from Twitter Thailand Phenomenon

Hashtags Chosen time frame and reason(s) Tweets

(n) Data set 1: #โตแล้วเลือกเองได้ (#WeGrownupsCanVoteFor Ourselves) 23 March 2019

(the day the announcement was broadcast) to 24 March 2019

(the national election day)

198 Data set 2:

#ขบวนเสด็จ

(#RoyalMotorcades)

1-31 October 2019

(the month the hashtag had been trending) and from 12-31 January 2020

(After the king announced his concern about citizens being affected by the royal motorcades people started

using this hashtag again)

575 Data set 3:

#saveนิรนาม

(#saveAnonymous)

20 February 2020

(when the news of the arrest was shared online) to 24 February 2020

(when the account owner was released on bail)

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Data set 4:

#เสาหลักจะไม่หักอีกต่อไป #ธรรมศาสตร ์และการชุมนุม

(University flash mobs)

24 and 26 February 2020

(when the two flash mobs at universities from chosen

hashtags took place) 223

Data set 5: #กษัตริย ์มีไว้ท าไม

(#WhyDoWeNeedaKing)

21 March 2020

(when the hashtag was trending) to 6 April 2020

(the day King Vajiralongkorn appeared on mainstream media addressing about Coronavirus

crisis for the first time after the outbreak)

443

Analysis Procedure

In-depth manual coding of Twitter content, although slower, is argued to be more accurate compared with automatic coding due to the ability of humans to process linguistic nuances of text (Kim et al., 2013; Watts et al., 2018). Besides such finding, without an understanding of the local context (e.g., political situations, fear of being prosecuted by the lese majesty law, and social norms that pressure one to show love and royalty towards the monarchy in Thai culture), the analysis of this study would lose its meaning. Therefore, manual coding is employed to do the content analysis following a thematic analysis process. To answer the research questions, this study seeks to organize its findings through themes and patterns shared among the five data sets (Braun & Clarke, 2006). In the absence of much prior research to base itself on—both regarding topic and context— the current study follows an inductive qualitative approach without pre-defined codebook.

Following Braun and Clarke’s (2006) guideline, manual data collection already makes the researcher more familiar with the materials before starting the initial coding process in which close reading is required. In open coding steps, codes are inductively generated and assigned to each tweet. Although the approach of this study is inductive, the coding process is also theory-driven as specific research questions are asked based on specific theoretical concepts (i.e., participatory politics, connective actions, and affective publics) as elaborated in the theoretical section (Braun

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& Clarke, 2006, p. 18). Therefore, the coding process focuses on units of analysis that can answer the research questions: types of accounts (anonymous or identifiable), activities performed, audience whom the messages are communicated to, collective forms of participation, issues and concerns expressed, and expressing tactics. After that, the axial coding process is run to generate categories of codes that can encapsulate potential themes to answer the research questions.

Findings

Regarding RQ1, the qualitative exploration of tweets in this study finds three main characteristics of the ways young Thai citizens have utilized Twitter to engage in the issues related to the monarchy. The three elements of this phenomenon are interacting with like-minded strangers, using hashtags for activism, and collaboratively setting agenda.

Interacting with anonymous but like-minded friends

One distinctive behavior of how Thai youngsters use Twitter to criticize the monarchy is to use a fake account as 96.7% of the 1,832 tweets collected from five datasets were tweeted by unidentifiable users. In Thailand, “แอคหลุม” (ac-loom) is a fake account created by young netizens for particular purposes on social media sites, mostly Twitter. Names used for the accounts can be meaningless or random—anything but real names. It is claimed to originally start from a trend of Korean TV shows that required audiences to vote for artists and singers via Twitter. In order to get a popular vote, fans create anonymous accounts to boost the votes for their celebrities. However, the purposes for using an anonymous account vary nowadays.

Finding Twitter easier to hide their identities, many Thai youngsters escape from peer-based network like Facebook where parents, family members, school friends including some teachers are all friended in order to express what actually is on one’s mind without having to filter or edit a message in order to sound appropriate (Dek-d, 2018). The current analysis suggests that

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Thai youngsters use fake accounts to engage in political issues especially about the monarchy in order to hide their real identity from the Thai state. This is reflected in the Dataset 3, #saveAnonymous, when many people who communicated using the hashtag expressed a great concern about privacy and security of using Twitter, since the Thai police could track the information and were able to arrest ‘Anonymous’ who used a fake account.

Although the loose hashtag-based community of Twitter Thailand is full of anonymous people joining the conversations, users vibrantly interact with each other as if they talk to ‘like-minded friends’ who share the same feelings and thoughts about the monarchy.2 For example, when one user expressed concern that s/he could risk being prosecuted using hashtags and tweeting something related to the monarchy, other users reply “we will go to jail together” or “the jail is not big enough to fit us all.” There are many examples of tweets that refer to “our generation,” and “our future.” When ‘Anonymous,’ a 20-year-old Twitter user was arrested, some users tweeted about ‘Anonymous’ as if he was a friend. Some directly used the word “friend” when referring to him. One of the users who never knew ‘Anonymous’ in person shared a story of visiting him while being detained. The user told him that ‘Twitter friends’ were sending support and that #saveAnonymous was trending in order to let him know that he was supported.

Using Hashtags for Activism

Besides interacting with like-minded Twitter users, a second characteristic revealed in this analysis is the act that Thai youngsters use hashtags for activism, mobilizing and showing solidarity. Dataset 1 shows that besides using the hashtag #WeGrownupsCanVoteforOurselves to express dissent towards King Vajiralonkorn, Thai youngsters tweeted to mobilize each other to vote against dictatorship and to advocate democracy. In Dataset 3 about #saveAnonymous, there

2 ‘Like-minded’ in this context refers to young Thai citizens who are pro-democracy, pro-human rights, and

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was a fundraising campaign created to help release ‘Anonymous’ on bail. During the campaign, some users used the hashtag to randomly give away free books, such as George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984, to people who helped donate. The act of reading these books were used in offline demonstration against the military after 2014 coup with activists being detained by the police as a result. One user helped ‘Anonymous’ by offering free pictures of her breast in exchange with people showing the donation receipt in the direct message. Many users changed their (fake) account names to “Anonymous” to show solidarity and also to challenge the Thai authorities. In Dataset 4, hashtags were created for each university that organized on-ground flash mobs demanding democracy from the military-led government. Young citizens who were not joining the protests tweeted to show solidarity with the protestors: Some tweeted lyrics of ‘Do You Hear the People Sing?’ which was sung in the flash mobs. Some tweeted his/her three-finger salute picture which was the symbolic act used in offline demonstrations.

Collaboratively Setting Agenda

There is no official public sphere in Thailand where citizens can openly talk or discuss about the monarchy, especially when the mainstream media are self-censored due to the lese-majeste law. In the absence of Thai journalists doing a risky job, this study finds that young Thai citizens use Twitter to set the political agenda voicing dissent and discuss about the royal family. When it comes to controversial information about the Thai monarchy that mainstream media do not report, young Twitter users collaboratively make the hashtags trending, report stories, link issues by using hashtags, and share information from external sources.

As found in almost every dataset, users ask each other to actively use the hashtags in order to make them nationally trending. In every dataset, there were users enthusiastically reporting at the moment the hashtags were trending on Twitter Thailand. Considering that mainstream media do not report about monarchy-related topics Twitter users are interested in, hashtags especially the

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trending ones can be perceived as important issues for the young citizens who want to make their voices heard. This intention is reflected in Dataset 2 about #RoyalMotorcade in which alternative Thai media outlets and international ones reported people’s dissent on Twitter. Some users shared online news articles and expressed directly that s/he expected Thai mainstream media to report about the issue. Besides national audience, young Twitter users also want to communicate with international audience. The aims are to ask for help and mainly to let the world know about injustice and violation of freedom of expression in Thailand. This behavior is found in Dataset 3 when users brainstormed with each other how to help ‘Anonymous.’ Some users directly mentioned the Twitter accounts of the prominent international media outlets to report about the issue as one way to help him since Thai mainstream media did not pay attention. In Dataset 5 #WhyDoWeNeedaKing, one Twitter user tweeted: “Hello for who accidentally clicked this tag would be surprised what’s this right? This is about our king THAILAND KING that We’re never ask for. This country is democracy, but we do not have the right to freedom of speech but we will not tolerate it anymore.”

Another practice is that users used the hashtag to real-time report about the royal motorcades they were encountering with the details of where and how long they had waited including a picture. Some reported their experiences witnessing the ambulances being asked by the traffic police to stop for the royal motorcades. Moreover, they also make use of different hashtags in one tweet to suggest that the issues are related. For example, the significant pattern observed is tagging hashtags related to the monarchy with other hashtags that show dissent towards the military-led government and political injustice, such as #PrayoutGetOut (dissent towards the Prime Minister) and #Saveอนาคตใหม่ (demand justice for the dissolved pro-democracy political party). In Dataset 3 and 4, it is observed that some users tagged both hashtags about helping ‘Anonymous’ and the flash mobs demanding democracy. These actions can be interpreted that for

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the young citizens, the monarchy, the military-led government, and the violation of freedom of expression are related. This pattern of using Twitter is significant because no mainstream media have questioned or investigated the tie between the monarchy and the military in Thai politics nor have they reported the flash mobs of young people demanding democracy with issues related to the monarchy.

When discussing about controversial issues of the monarchy, Thai Twitter users also share information that cannot be found from the government and Thai mainstream media. Sources of information that users provide to each other vary, such as international media outlets covering news about the king, Wikipedia, YouTube, and prominent anti-monarchy critics that provide alternative perspectives about the Thai royal family. These practices might be seemingly normal in democratic society when people generally use online platform to share political content. In Thailand however, such activities of sharing alternative information about the monarchy put users at risk considering the fact that there was an activist charged by the lese-majeste for just sharing BBC news article written about the bibliography of the king (Reporters without borders, 2017).

Besides main characteristics of how young Thais utilize Twitter to voice dissent towards the monarchy, the current study also scrutinizes communicative strategies used by the young dissidents to express themselves under the state and social surveillance. Although there are some direct critiques, Twitter Thailand is full of creative and inexplicit criticisms. Regarding RQ2, this study finds (1) English, (2) humor, and (3) coded language from pop culture used as main subtle tactics by young citizens on Twitter.

English: “To save my life. I have to tweet in English hahaha”

Believing that tweeting in English can keep them less at risk for being charged by Thai authorities, English is a popular strategy used by young Thais to protect themselves when

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expressing about the monarchy. Interestingly, English is, most of the time, used when the users tweet as if talking to or criticizing the king directly. This behavior of using English as a strategy is remarkable in data set 1, #WeGrownUpsCanVoteForOurselves. For example, one user tweeted: “We saw your works every time when we watching your advertising in cinema. You always wears military uniform. Your works is always tie with military. Yes, we know who you're backed up.” Interestingly, the English language allows users to communicate with less hierarchy than the Thai language. Using ‘I’, ‘We’, and ‘You’ is not the way Thai citizens are supposed to talk to the monarchy; officially, the use of ‘royal words’ not present in English is required when talking about or talking to royal family members. As observed from the datasets, users who criticized in Thai language usually omit the subject or object that refer to the monarchy. Therefore, although it is still considered inexplicit tactic as using English makes the message ambiguous whom users are criticizing, it can also be argued that English makes it more possible to express dissent as if they are talking directly to the monarchy which is almost impossible in offline context.

Humor: “Welcome to jail party!”

A major share of Thai youngsters’ expression on Twitter involves humor. Memes, satire, and sarcasm are used when engaging in issues related to the monarchy. ‘Jail joke’ is found to be popular in this study. It is used to communicate that users understand the tweets are about criticizing the monarchy and that they are doing something that Thai authorities can use the law to prosecute them. It is also used to show solidarity communicating to other users that we ‘think the same.’ Another joke created due to the fear of the lese-majeste law is ‘play-it-safe’ when users sarcastically included “Long live the king” at the end of tweets that actually criticize the king. Many users also tweet memes indicating that they want to retweet the message because they agree but they better not do it in order to protect themselves. Lastly, young users also use ‘self-mocking’

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jokes such as “we are just dust under the king’s feet,” “we are slaves,” and “we are in underdeveloped country.”

Coded language from pop culture: Remember who the real enemy is, it’s Justine Bieber

The strategy of using coded language from pop culture is vibrantly practiced by Thai youngsters. Quotes, scenes, and symbols from famous movies about people fighting against the status quo and rivalry in politics that can be interpreted to fit the Thai political context, such as Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, the Hunger Games, and Les Misérables, are symbolically used to express dissent towards the monarchy. ‘Lord Voldemort’ is used to refer to the king, while three-finger salute gesture from the Hunger Games and the song ‘Do You Hear the People Sing?’ from Les Misérables movie, the story with the background of an anti-monarchist rebellion of Parisian republicans, are famously used to show resistance.

Importantly, this study finds that characteristics as answers to RQ1 have enabled young Twitter users to collaboratively create coded language understood among in-group audience who are informed about controversial stories of the Thai monarchy shared in hashtag-based communities. To illustrate, there was a story of King Vajiralongkorn covered by international media about him wearing a crop top with fake tattoos walking in the mall in Germany (Kentish, 2016). For young Thais, his appearance resembled with one picture of Justin Bieber. Therefore, from then on, Justin Bieber is used by Thai Twitter users when explicitly talking about the king. People who do not know about this news, which was not reported by Thai media, will not be able to understand the real meaning of Justin Bieber on Twitter Thailand.

Discussion

Focusing on the Thai context with restricted freedom of expression and where there is a lack of an open public sphere on issues linked with the monarchy, this study argues that a digital

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sphere like Twitter is crucial for civic engagement and political participation of the young citizens for three reasons. First, being pressured by social and cultural norms and regulated by the law, it is unlikely —and even illegal for Thai people—to show disrespect to the king in the public spaces or among friends and family members, even when in reality they are not a royalist. This situation is what Márquez (2018) called “preference falsification”, when people’s public preferences differ from their private ones, which is likely to happen in authoritarian regimes. However, and in line with Papacharissi (2010)’s private sphere concept, the collapse of public and private boundaries caused by information communication technologies has allowed private thoughts of young Thai citizens about the monarchy to be tweeted as public expression (p. 68). Joining public arenas on Twitter, young dissidents have a greater control and expressive tools to counter powerlessness as part of their everyday-life routines just through the use of smartphones (Papacharissi, 2010). Being allowed on Twitter to employ random account names, young users have more control over “performance of the self” (Papacharissi, 2010, p. 69) to voice dissent towards the monarchy with anonymity with less risk of being prosecuted.

Second, being able to find and interact with like-minded but anonymous peers on Twitter has changed the relationship between young Thais and the state including the monarchy who have lost their monopoly as gatekeepers (Kahne et al., 2015). Expressing feelings and opinions, sharing and analyzing controversial information about the monarchy, mobilizing and advocating, showing solidarity with each other in hashtag-based communities; these practices of participatory politics on Twitter allows young citizens to collaboratively set their own agenda (Kahne et al., 2015; Vromen et al., 2015). Considering that Thailand has no public sphere for citizens to discuss about the monarchy, a digital sphere is the only place where many people can virtually gather together through hashtags to create counter publics (Fraser, 1990; Lee, 2018) against both the monarchy and the violation of freedom of expression. Moreover, as the king did response to the criticisms

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on Twitter significantly without self-censored Thai mainstream media reported, it has proved that the voices in technologically-enabled sphere are heard and impactful. Anonymous but connected, Thai Twitter users are able to establish organizationally-enabled networks to accomplish civic or political goals that even have an impact outside the virtual sphere (Papacharissi, 2010; Bennett et al., 2010; Bennett & Segerberg, 2012; Kahne et al., 2015).

The third reason is based on the findings of this study’s second research question examining the communicative strategies. The intertwinement of personal and political lines in the digital sphere (Papacharissi, 2010) has enabled young Twitter users to collaboratively create coded language to criticize the monarchy. Anonymous users who are informed of controversial issues about the king shared only in the virtual sphere collaboratively mix such political information with nonpolitical pop culture they are personally interested in. In accordance with Street et al. (2012)’s study about the implications of pop culture on political knowledge and engagement of youth in democratic context, pop culture helps Thai youth to connect their cultural life to the political situations in the country. Through interaction in hashtag-based spheres where politics and pop culture are merged, Thai youth talk about movies and songs as a source of political knowledge and collective identity motivating their feelings and judgment about the conduct of politics (Street et al., 2012, p. 338). Therefore, songs and movies, mostly the internationally famous ones serve as powerful tools to show resistance against the monarchy as they help foster development of collective identity (Hart, 2007) in both political and nonpolitical aspects of young individuals.

The most important function of pop culture in Thailand’s context is to help protect young dissidents from state and social surveillance. In harmony with Lee (2018)’s study on Cambodian youth, the young Thais hide in plain sight by intentionally and creatively creating multi-layered political messages that can only be understood among in-group audiences as “such subtleties in tactics, attitudes, and expression among young civic actors are initially invisible to the uninformed

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eye” (Lee, 2018, p. 4096). Unlike young people in democratic societies that can openly share their opinions (Kligler-Vilenchik & Literat, 2019), Thai youth need hidden scripts (Scott, 1990) to be able to do everyday political talk as a direct mode of expression, although preferred, is not an option for people who fear the prosecution. The ambiguity of subtle forms of expression also allows broader range of audience to get involved in taboo topics, like the monarchy, as it can reach people who would not normally dare to engage in (Kahne et al., 2013; Bernal, 2013).

Politicizing pop culture materials also allows young citizens to push the boundary of showing solidarity and expressing dissent towards the monarchy under lese-majesty law in actual public spaces where real identities are forcedly revealed. Not only tweeting, these pop culture codes originally and collaboratively generated in Twittersphere are also used in the offline flash mobs of university students against dictatorship. The collected tweets of users who used the hashtag to real-time reported from demonstrations with pictures and videos showed that the protests were full of subtle practices of showing resistance against the monarchy: "You-Know-Who" phrase from Harry Potter was used by the student who spoke on the stage when referred to the king, the three-finger salute from the Hunger Games was a popular gesture to show solidarity, and the song from Les Misérables was sung by the young protestors. There was no report of any charge for criticizing the monarchy, although those demonstrations were full of the state officers patrolling.

In democratic context, communicative transformation caused by convergent technologies has posed challenges to democracy in disrupted public spheres urging scholars to rethink about political communication and find new ways to understand new political vernacular in order to make sense of relationships between media, publics, and democratic institutions (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012; Bennett & Pfetsch, 2018). This current study, however, argues that the technologically-enabled sphere is crucial for democratization in repressive regime like Thailand.

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Such change in the way media, publics, and state institutions communicate has allowed the 21st century citizens of Thailand to participate in contemporary politics under repression by utilizing the merged spheres of the public and private, and the personal and political to collaboratively create counter publics with expressive tools in order to set their own agenda and achieve political goals. Thai youngsters are using fake accounts and pop-culture codes to tweet real thoughts, to share controversial information that cannot be found in the state’s public sphere, to advocate democracy, and to show resistance against the monarchy questioning its position in Thai politics. As long as social media platforms can ensure privacy for users considering the fact that people’s practices vary in different political backgrounds3, the digital sphere is, so far, the space that offers autonomy and security for the young dissidents to push Thailand towards democratization. Because in the contemporary politics of the Democratic Regime of Government with the King as Head of the State,young citizens have utilized social media to express that the sovereignty of the country should belong to the people, not the monarchy.

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Results of extra analyses show that the media use of non-Muslim immigrant adolescents in our study is comparable to the media use of non-Muslim adolescents (non-immigrant).

In the research model, there is stated that there is an expected moderating effect of gender to the relationship between performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social