Pheu Thai accuses rivals of launching online smear campaigns, urges EC to investigate
Pheu Thai Party has called on the Election Commission (EC) to track down other parties’ “cyber warriors” that are on a mission to spread fake content and discredit their rivals.
The allegations were made by former justice minister Somsak Thepsuthin, a core member of Pheu Thai, at a press conference on Monday.
He said many of Pheu Thai’s political rivals had deployed these so-called “cyber warriors”, but did not name any names. He also claimed that several parties also used their cyber warriors to post positive information about them to sway the result of opinion surveys in their own benefit.
Somsak said this online battle was aimed to build a false impression to benefit some coalition parties at the cost of the opposition parties.
Somsak reckons only 20 mobile phones are needed to spread the information very fast and either boost popularity or damage the image of opponents.
“These clandestine operations are unfair to their political rivals,” Somsak said.
“So, I would like to urge EC to pay attention to these operations urgently. The EC must find out who these trolls are and what groups they are linked to.”
He said these smear campaigns were as bad as defamation and violation of the Computer Crimes Act, so the EC should not ignore them.
