Angkhana and Anchana: The two women fighting to make liars pay

But among the faceless social media accounts, one stuck out: a website called Pulony, which purportedly “tells the truth” about the Deep South. In reality, as the two women told the press recently, the site has engaged in smear campaigns against Angkhana and Anchana for years, casting them as paid agents, provocateurs and sympathisers of insurgents out to undermine the military’s peace-building efforts.

Then one day in 2020, as they were watching a parliament debate, they heard mention of the website. Opposition MPs were grilling the authorities for what they described as internal documents within the Internal Security Operation Command (Isoc) seeking funding for its propaganda campaigns. One of the items was the Pulony website.

Speaking at the Foreign Correspondent’s Club of Thailand earlier this week, Angkhana and Anchana said they were amazed that the lies about them were being funded with taxpayers’ money.

“We are just two women who work for human rights,” Anchana said. “Yet we watched a government agency ask the government to cover the cost of its attacks on us. That’s just wrong.”

With digital communities around the world awash with disinformation and smear campaigns, social media-obsessed Thailand is no different. Information Operation (IO) has become an intangible part of our online town squares, employed by political factions of all convictions. But even in a culture steeped in this sad practice, the plight of Angkhana and Anchana has managed to stand out thanks to credible evidence that the IO targeting them was not run by any political groups or politicians seeking to win votes, but the state itself.

The pair fought back. Together they filed a lawsuit with the Civil Court in November 2020 seeking damages from Isoc. They named the quasi-military counter-insurgency agency as being at the heart of the disinformation warfare wielded by Pulony. The website appeared to have stopped operating soon after the lawsuit was filed but remains accessible to this day.

In one of its last entries, the website rehashed a common conspiracy theory claiming that human rights activists in the deep South, environmentalists, digital privacy advocates, and the news outlet Prachatai – where I work – are really part of the same network paid by George Soros and other external influences to sabotage Thailand.

“This is the model of sabotage that’s influenced by foreign money to devastate [Thailand’s] economy, politics and society, in order to seek interest on behalf of global politics,” the post said. “And some Thais who have no morals have agreed to be the tools of foreign powers to murder their own country.”

For its part, Isoc has denied any responsibility. Its spokesperson said the documents weren’t an expense sheet, but the list of websites deemed to be of interest for intelligence monitoring – a claim dismissed by many critics as an incredibly lame defence.

There’s also ample evidence of the Thai armed forces being caught red-handed in their crude attempt at a disinformation campaign, like that time in 2021 when Facebook identified at least 185 accounts and groups as IOs run by none other than the military.

“Although the people behind it attempted to conceal their identities and coordination, our investigation found links to the Thai military’s Internal Security Operations Command,” Facebook said at the time.

A year earlier, Twitter also shut down nearly 1,000 accounts linked to the army’s IO. The authorities, of course, duly denied both allegations.

The verdict on Pulony was returned earlier this week, much to the disappointment of Angkhana and Anchana.

The court ruled that the plaintiff could not prove beyond reasonable doubt that Isoc was indeed operating the website, citing the lack of technical evidence like web traffic data – something Angkhana and Anchana said is near impossible for them to obtain.

However, the two women said they took heart from other parts of the verdict, in which the court affirmed that the passages published by Pulony were slanderous in nature, and recognised the pair as human rights defenders who had their rights violated by Pulony’s smear attacks.

The court went as far as to suggest that Angkhana and Anchana should be compensated, but it’s simply not possible to pinpoint the perpetrators.

At the presser, Anchana said the lawsuit already achieved its goal of raising public awareness about the existence of IOs and the attempts to hold them accountable, especially those engineered by state entities.

“The state’s duty is to protect the rights of the public. The state shouldn’t end up being the one who violates those rights,” she said.

The verdict also raised an uncomfortable question for those who are obliged to combat falsehoods in this digital era, like journalists. How can you ever hope to unmask those behind the torrent of lies and hold them responsible for their action?

The question is perhaps now more urgent with the general election on the horizon.

Anyone with a sense of history need not be told about the perils of IOs intent on sowing confusion and unfounded prejudice among voters.

Since those lies cannot be reliably traced back to their perpetrators, legal actions like the one launched by Angkhana and Anchana will likely fail. A more viable solution would probably be social-media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and TikTok adding labels to accounts that clearly exhibit the pattern of IOs, whether sponsored by state or private entities. But again, the lack of hard evidence may turn this initiative problematic.

My humble suggestion as a journalist is to use journalism as a countermeasure to these falsehoods.

Instead of the potentially hopeless task of hunting down whoever’s behind these IOs, journalists should actively confront and call out their fabrications. News outlets should fact-check any disinformation spread by IOs they encounter, regardless of their sides or

allegiances, instead of parroting them uncritically as news material.

Media publications can even join hands with existing fact-checking networks, like “CoFact”, where a loose coalition of journalists, editors, and researchers band together to set the record straight.

Angkhana and Anchana shouldn’t have to fight the culture of deceit that permeates our digital ecosystem on their own. It’s time for the media to take up the fight as well, and if we can’t make the liars pay, at least we’ll be able to inform the public to be wary of their lies.

Teeranai Charuvastra is a journalist based in Bangkok. He also serves in the Thai Journalists Association as its vice president for Press Freedom and Media Reform.