Social Media and the Red Shirt Revolution
Most scholars are in conflict with regard to the subject of revolution in the age of social media. Until now, revolution has been considered a top-down process. In Thai situation, things might have been different. The Red Shirt Revolution in Thailand was one of the first of the “Twitter” revolutions, that is one that was fueled by social media and Web 2.0 technology. Since then, other revolutions have come as well. The lone citizen is now no longer on their own. The dissident in Chiang Mai now can commiserate with their brother or sister in Tahrir Square and plan revolution on a country to country or even on a global basis. Even as this writer types up a dissertation proposal, demonstrators coordinate strategy on a global basis to protest corporate greed. It is with this in mind that this study looks back at the Red Shirt Revolution, its Web 2.0 technology and how this nexus of politics and technology will continue to affect Thai communications in the near future. The paper concludes that the homeland conflict spilled over into social and business contacts and political engagements and that the effects will be very long reaching, including affecting the basis of what Thais think about their very nationhood itself.
Introduction
Globalization has increased cross-border migrations, communications and information flows. Consequently, it enables the Thai diaspora to involve and build networks between the country of origin and the diaspora more easily. This paper will describe the concept of globalization and Revolution in Thailand as it relates to social media and its effectiveness. Also, the study will try to gauge the ongoing effects of Web 2.0 technology since the Red Shirt Revolution. The pervasiveness of Web 2.0 social media and the socially connected Web has changed the power dynamics between governments and citizens, with organizations using online social networks with varying success to recruit members, promote issues and raise money (Phahlamohlaka 2010, 57). This author will try to find out what the status of the new medium is, either as a force against or for oppression, or rather somewhere in between.
Insurgent media is being used by opposition forces to combat the establishment forces who control the corporate media. This insurgent media includes blogging and twitter, regular email list serves, Google groups and others to play a major role in disseminating opposition information and views. Unfortunately for the Red Shirts, the reach of the new technologies was still limited to mostly urban areas, so the role of social media as a change agent was still limited as opposed to more recently during the Arab Spring. However, social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter brought together diverse communities (new to the technology) to support a cause and created new communities as well. These were hitherto formerly unserved communities. Mobile phones and community radio (many times the podcasts are carried on social media sites) can now be employed to connect small rural communities. Now, these communities provide their own news, diminishing the power of major corporate and establishment news organizations. Instead, they focus more on the local issues that mattered most such as education, health and other subjects. At the same time, over-fragmentation of the news may take away from the appeal of the imagined communities that constitute the nation. In its place, there is a danger that conservative and reactionary peasant parochialism will work against democratic change, such as we saw in the Yellow Shirt victory (Moksnes and Meilin 2010, 49-50).
However, in Thailand, opposition forces still succeeded in welding together a cohesive coalition using the new Internet technologies. The Red Shirt protests began with a gathering of 150,000 people on March 12th, 2010 and were coordinated through a combination of old off-line organizing and new online social networking. This was followed up by covert radio and satellite television broadcasts. Prior to the social media mobilizations, news, information and dialogues were exchanged on bulletin boards and news. The Thai Red Shirt identity was formed around the collective belief that the current government was in reality an illegitimate front for commercial, aristocratic and military elites that had overturned the electoral decision of the people by force in a coup d’etat (Noblet 2010, 29-30).
Statement of the Research Problem
Thailand has been continually plagued by political conflicts since late 2005. Unfortunately for this country, the transition from military rule to a more democratic society has not been successful. For Thailand, civil-military relations have failed as the institutionalization of civilian control in Thailand has stalled. Civilians in the country understandably overestimated their ability to steer the Thai military establishment through robust action, thereby, provoking the military crackdown.
This has led also to the deterioration of tourism and the general economy due to fear of renewed violence. The image of Thailand as ‘the land of smiles’ is gone as social harmony has been shattered on an unprecedented scale. This paper’s research is concerned with how this political revolution was helped along by social media technology, its continued effects in Thailand and its effects upon the sister revolutions that seem to spreading as social media percolates throughout the world as a whole to give peasants and lower classes an unprecedented ability to be heard above their social stations (Croissant 2011, 1-2).
History of Conflict
The case of Thailand is especially complicated. In the case of Thailand many structural models have under predicted the scale of conflict escalation in this country. Without diverging too far for the 2010 issue, suffice it to say that Thailand has multiple, ongoing, concurrent internal conflicts which complicate any aggregated country-wide analysis and severely challenges the explanation of the evolution of conflict in that country. This leaves a large void in knowledge that is multidimensional and spatially disjointed. An especially critical point for any observer to understand is that the populations of pro- and anti-government groups are composed of dynamically changing demographic memberships. Thus, a traditional aggregated, structural and economic explanation of the Thai opposition has little value in explaining the current conflict dynamics in Thailand. One must look at the fact that the new coalitions on both sides, government and anti-government are likely responding and coalescing because of the new technologies themselves. The news makers themselves have become stakeholders and actors in the conflict (Metternich, et al. 2011, 2).
Contextual Background and Literature Review
Web 2.0 and the Revolutions of the 21st Century
First the Thai Red Shirt Revolution must be seen in the context of the other electronically propelled revolutions which have been radiating out from an Asian epicenter in the Philippines. On January 17, 2001 Philippine President Joseph Estrada’s impeachment trial appeared a failure as loyalists in the Philippine Congress voted to lay aside necessary evidence against him. In less than two hours, thousands of angry Filipinos converged on Epifanio de los Santos Avenue, a major crossroads in Manila. The protest was arranged partly by forwarded text messages and a flash crowd quickly swelled with over a million people arriving in downtown Manila. Clay Shirky in his Foreign Affairs article says that this revolution laid the template for revolutions from the Philippines to Belarus, including Thailand in the Red Shirt Revolution. As the technology has advanced, social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter have enhanced the effectiveness of dissidents who no longer have to fight alone. Such revolutions do not always work as Shirky points out. According to his analysis, the Red Shirt uprising in Thailand followed a similar path where technology savvy protesters with social media occupied downtown Bangkok until the Thai government cracked down and dispersed the protesters (Shirky 2011, 1-2).
It is necessary to analyze Web 2.0 technology and its effects upon Thai factions in detail. Social media represents a technological leap to overcome government oppression. Many of its media sources such as You Tube had been blocked in a number of overseas countries, including Thailand. A fig leaf of legality and contract proprietary policy hangs over this as YouTube’s Terms of Use policy states that users may not submit any material that contradicts applicable local, national as well as international laws and regulations. The Thai king used this as basis for banning offensive You Tube videos in and out of the country. After protests from Thais in the diaspora, Google created a program algorithm of geo-locational filtering that would block only access to these disputed videos for subjects of the king who were users in Thailand (Faris, Wang and Palfrey 2008, 176). Needless to say the hackers would have their day in Bangkok.
Certainly, in the era of Web 2.0, Thais were also looking over their borders at several other South East Asia countries, including that of Burma and then found ways around You Tube’s local Thai constraints by hacking or by using new social media tools to communicate messages. While they are doing this, we must understand what the hardware tool was. It was and is still not the computer, but rather the cellphone. In Thailand only 13% of the people own a computer while 82% who access to a cellphone (Kaplan and Haenlein 2010, 67). It was time for the Revolution to come to the micro-screen.
So, were the tweeters effective? Do they know how to use the media properly or are they just making noise in their tweets? Indeed, the Burmese example is especially interesting because the Saffron Revolution in 2007 was inspired by dissidents with Internet resources in Thailand. It would seem that perhaps this may have happened in the other direction as in 2010 in Thailand where the people were inspired by the Burmese example (Chowdury 2008. 7) .
While the unrest of 2010 has been central to much of the examination of the effect of social media in the Red Shirt Revolution, this was also the case in the period in the year prior to the 2010 unrest. Former leader Thaksin began cranking up his social media machine in 2009. He was nervous about a court verdict on his irregular asset gains that might result in a court order of the confiscation of all his assets, (amounting to 76 billion Baht-$2.2 billion). He felt he had no choice other than to step up the Reds’ pressure tactics in the streets. This included using electronic tools such as satellite TV, Facebook, Twitter and extensive text messaging to communicate with his Red Shirt supporters (Prasirtsuk 2010, 206).
In the case of Thailand hordes of otherwise quiet Thais scoured the web for websites criticizing the monarch (Schossbock and Banfield-Mumb 2011, 8). Unfortunately, many countries, Thailand included are using these revolutions as an excuse to demand Internet censorship. The Thai government, for example, uses the country’s censorship laws prohibiting any offensive material aimed at the Thai king to go after administrators of opposition Web sites and not just to shut the Web content down. In the case of Cheeranuch Premchaiphorn, the Web administrator of the most influential Thai political Web site, Prachatai, was detained because a comment critical of the king was seem on the site. The Thai authorities “crowdsource” the process of selecting URLs of sites to be blocked by encouraging loyalists to surf the Web and then to submit offensive sites to the government (Morozov 2009, 82). While the Thai government is suppressing Internet dissent, it is also attempting to unleash commerce via the same social media vehicles, sponsoring “flash sales” instead of flash mobs (Hartley 2010, 1).
Indeed, there have been questions about whether or not governments (including the Thai government) have been successful in co-opting the Internet infrastructure to suppress dissent (Bailey and Labovitz 2011, 2). Ironically, the counter revolution may be in getting the urban middle class to shop instead of revolt. Therefore, what may be necessary is to consider is not whether or not social media use in revolutions is happening. It definitely is. Rather, we need to be asking how effective it is and for who. A framework or template is necessary to do this
The Political Spark
The protest activities in Thailand come from the 2006 ousting of the Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra. The pro-Thaksin protestors were represented the United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship (UDD). They had been protesting against Abhisit Vejjajiva and they banded together under the “Red Shirt? label. Anti-Thaksin protesters were represented by the Peoples’ Alliance for Democracy (PAD) supported by Vejjajiva’s government and they had been successful in toppling two prior governments that were pro-Thaksin. PAD represents royalists, businessmen and the urban middle class that came together under the name “Yellow Shirt.” In addition, recent reports suggest that contrary to the uses of Twitter and social media in other revolutions, in Thailand the pro-government actors have dominated Twitter as a media outlet. Effectively, Thailand might prove to be the case of a Twitter Counter-Revolution where pro-government stakeholders (including the police and intelligence units) used Tweets to spread disinformation or to quell the social unrest. Indeed, the widespread adoption of the platform jointly by opposing factions makes the Thai experience an event suitable for much greater attention (Bajpai and Jaiswal 2011, 2).
Internet resources continued to be used by the anti-government forces in the wake of the protest. A most telling example of this can be found in the reporting in the wake of the burning of the Bangkok’s Central World (CW) Shopping Complex. The arson was blamed on the Red Shirts. They continue to contest the attack on this capitalist icon by using Internet news sites, including social media pages (Taylor 2011, 5).
Unfortunately, the terrorism charge or the threat of terrorism charges has spread rapidly and greatly increased the power of the government against Red Shirt protesters in Thailand, including the repression of opposition of social media that is critical of the government. Although the new social media technologies at first offered unregulated media resources for anti-government activists to communicate, the Thai government has rapidly caught up with each and every innovation with its own, including monitoring, blocking and interfering with opposition emails, Facebook and SMS or text messaging. What is apparent is that the new technologies have been used both to repress and to avoid repression simultaneously in a dynamic and changing fashion. Political flash mobs such as those in the Philippines in 2001 are important examples of how new information and communication technologies are now being used to mobilize protests against the repressive Thai government. It must be remembered that this is in a context where there has been a limited freedom of the press or access to alternative media. New technologies are brought into the fight as soon as they appear (Flesher and Wood 2011, 3).
Additionally, there have been charges leveled against the Red Shirt insurgents as being anti-patriotic or anti-Thai. Has the new social media redefined what it means to be Thai? This role of Thainess as a political tool for in the Red Shirt Revolution and its role in the social media portrayals of the pro-government and anti-government forces must be briefly considered. This is particularly the case in the incident of the arson of the CW. The name of Thainess has been invoked by the government to crush the opposition. Thainess may continue to be used as a weapon by the Thai government in the future. However, Thai nationhood or Thainess not just a construct of the elite to serve their own interests and to maintain the power structure. Rather, the opposition has broadened the concept of Thai nationhood to include groups that have been outside of the social spectrum before. They have become stakeholders that the government has to contend with (even in opposition) that they have not had to before. Thailand is ethnically diverse. Ironically, some of the “out” groups now identify with being Thai. As social media develops, so will this sense of nationhood develop in new ways as well that may be new and unforeseeable (Bunyavejchewin, 2010, 247).
Project Research Perspective and Contribution
The Bajpai and Jaiswal paper is especially important because it is analyzing social media as either an instrument of revolution from above or below. This author would like to use the methodology The data collection methods are especially tantalizing. The paper’s primary data collection task concerned assembling tweets relevant to topics, i.e. The Thailand Protests and archiving those tweets into a format that is conducive for analysis. To achieve this, the study authors wrote a distributed Twitter crawler integrated with a post GRES database for storage. The crawler utilized the Twitter API that returned relevant tweets for a seven day period based on user-input keywords (terms like “redshirt,” “Bangkok” etc.). This newly created storage file was parsed and each tweet was then written to a database where each tweet possessing the same ID appeared only once. In addition, since twitter assigns each new re-tweet (i.e. A forwarded tweet) with a different ID these are also stored as unique database entries that provided re-tweets that were returned when querying for specific keywords (ibid, 3). While the authors do not draw specific conclusions, they do point to the need for more analysis to be done on these bundles of revolutionary Tweets to see if they sing a consistent tune (ibid, 9).
Research Objectives
The research objective will be to refine the Bajpai and Jaiswal methodology to make sense of the social media data. More esearch data is needed to make a conclusive analysis that will involve gathering social media data on the Yellow Shirts, police and soldiers and on the other side as well. Additionally diaspora tweets and their virtual participation needs to be analyzed.
My Research Perspective and Contribution
In February 2010, Thai red shirts overseas established a “Red Shirt International Organization” (RSIO) (now defunct) initiated in the United States which served as the information center for 38 countries. The movement is now clandestine. While research on the relationship between diaspora and homeland small but growing, it is difficult to find studies about the relationship between globalization, diaspora and conflict in the homeland. Most scholars who analyze globalization and social conflict do not include the diaspora, or focus only on it in direct relation to prolonging the conflict or supporting a peace process. Hardly anybody looked at the impact of globalization on diaspora in term of social, political, and economic relationship with the home country in conflict in a dynamic, ongoing fashion. Therefore, this author’s research will focus on the unplowed ground by analyzing the interrelationships between globalization, diaspora and the homeland conflict, including political, economic and social impacts as measured in bundles of tweets (Panchay 2010, 4).
Also, in this research, it will be necessary to analyze the effects of the 2010 revolution on the vital Thai tourist industry. The economic impact of any revolution will affect the ability of it to have continued momentum due to its impact upon participant stakeholders. Again, a detailed breakdown of the tweets is necessary and a computer model will shed light on the subject. A data mining study was applied to analyze 80 million tweet microblogs to explain and reflect both numerically and visually societal trends. For instance, the authors study in real time, the effect of the political instability in the city of Bangkok on tourism. In this the researchers demonstrated a hybrid methodology for tracking sentiments toward the well-known Phuket resort area. A Naive Bayes algorithm and binary choice keywords were brought together in order to create a measure of sentiment embedded tweets from Twitter. Multidimensional visualization was applied to the resulting time series data, thereby providing a richer understanding of the data. In doing so, they found practical information that could assist businesses in understanding the concerns of tourists and travelers (Claster, Cooper and Sallis 2010, 92). Certainly, applying this to analyzing government and anti-government tweets is also possible and necessary to advance research in this author’s study.
Scholars have been asking legitimately whether social media is really a force for liberation or is a force of government repression. In a study by Kyriakopoulou, that author seems to think that the technology can go either way. According to Kyriakopoulou, a community ethos needs to be established to mold the opposition into a credible force. However, the new technologies are a double-edged sword. The same potential instruments of “democracy” can also be used as mechanisms for the monitoring of citizens and can also be used to spread propaganda and sustain authoritarian orders (Kyriakopoulou 2011, 22-23).
Many scholars are presently calling for this ethos as a way for the technology to be used responsibly and progressively. Will home grown news in Thailand and other places in the world be held to the same high standards that it is for the establishment press? Will this alternate fourth estate loose its credibility due to irresponsibility?
This is especially the case where such news results in alleged violence against the government as happened with the Bangkok CW arson case (Benkler 2011,21-23).
Main Research Question
Do the sheer volume of tweets, Facebook or other types of instant messages or their content signal significance or must they be parsed into types of messages to make sense of them?
Follow on Research Sub-Questions
1. What are the interrelationships among globalization, diaspora and homeland conflict and also, what are the political, economic and social effects of these relationships in Thailand and how was social media used to advance the cause of revolution or to suppress it? Can bundles of tweets be analyzed to shed light on these relationships?
2. What are the political views and engagements of Thais using social media regarding the conflict in Thailand?
3. Has social media in Thailand created political polarization and affected social relations in Thailand before, during and after the Red Shirt Revolution?
More Information on the Time Frame, Proposed Budget and Methodology of the Project
At present, this author foresees that the project research should be completed in eight weeks. The majority of the time will be taken up in gathering social media data and to quantitatively analyze it. This should cost the about $2,000 for which this author will be applying for in the form of a grant from an educational foundation. This will broken down in the following table. Most of the costs of course will be in the acquisition and processing of the data. Data Mining and processing of the social media data will be the most time consuming activity of the dissertation project. To lessen costs, the author is considering a number of low cost or no cost tools for analyzing social media data.
These costs can be held down by using low cost resources available through the Social Media Research foundation. Since most of these resources are free, the costs will be primarily for the university’s computer services to perform the data mining task. The most promising of these is ThreadMill 0.1 which performs Social Accounting for Message Thread Collections. This includes Treemap data set analysis, AuthorLine visualization diagram formation, scatter plot visualization, time series line chart analysis and network diagram analysis. The following table will break down these services and the amount of time slots that will be required over the 8-week life of the collection project.
Task
Turnaround Times
Data Mining from Thai Twitter Sites
2 weeks
Data Analysis
2 weeks
Data Writeup and Inclusion in the Dissertation Copy
2 weeks
Data Checking and Proofing
8 weeks
Data Checking and Proofing will be done over the 8-week lifetime of the project.
The following tools can or will be used depending on the data:
1. Google Alerts: This service allows one to enter a keyword or a set of keywords for tracking purposes. After deciding on the keywords, one decides upon the frequency to be alerted to a match on those keywords.
2. Twitalyzer is a Twitter influence tracking service that offers data related rank within Twitter. The data can be broken down into the days of the week or hours of the day to help determine when the tweeted content was best received.
5. Socialmention works like Google Alerts but is geared more towards social media. After performing the search the data returned will includes measurement related to the sentiment surrounding the search, top keywords, passion at which others are talking about the subject.
6. Twitter Search monitors what is being said about the subject on Twitter. One can also use the advanced search features to monitor for any negative or positive sentiment being associated with the subject so one can analyze it properly. After performing a search and to continue monitoring one can subscribe to an RSS Feed for that query to continually monitor your search. The RSS feed will bring the data into the data mining system for large scale analysis.
7. Trackur is a simple to use monitoring tool that works by gathering together all mentions of a keyword search from around the social web. One can then save the searches and subscribe to the feed or have the results emailed.
9. A URL Shortening Service must be used with Twitter to ensure that messages and links fit within the 140 character limitation for analysis. One must select a service such as bit.ly or ow.ly that allows for analytics. Then the researcher needs to stick to the service so that the data can be tracked and monitored for the contents’ performance. Interestingly, sound bites are not just the fare of the established media, but also in the insurgent media.
Conclusion
As we have seen, globalization has increased cross-border migrations, communications and information flows. It has promoted new types of communications via Web 2.0 technologies. These technologies have enabled a Thai diaspora to involve and build an alternative news network with the place of origin and the host country more easily. The research proposal outlined here will expand the concept of the study of social media and revolution in Thailand as it relates to the effectiveness of social media and the question of who it has served, the opposition or the government. As we saw, both sides, the yellow and the red deployed and used social media effectively before and after the end of the Revolution in Bangkok. This study will also try to gauge the ongoing effect of Web 2.0 technology since the Red Shirt Revolution. The pervasiveness of Web 2.0 social media and the socially connected Web has changed the power dynamics between governments and citizens, with organizations using online social networks with varying success to recruit members, promote issues and raise money. In addition, governments have done this as well. More research will have to be done to gauge how this will change the social balance in and out of Thailand, in Southeast Asia and beyond.
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