Why and how do autocracies discursively conduct digital astroturfing against their populations? As these regimes increasingly co-opt social media to manipulate online political discourse, the current political disinformation literature continues to privilege a Cold War paradigm, focusing on countries that dominate Western foreign policy priorities and concerns. Its normative underpinnings overshadow other understudied cases that have also been weaponizing social media to manipulate domestic online discourses. Concurrently, findings from ethnographic interviews and big data approaches remain theoretically disconnected from the long-held logics of regime stabilization. I argue that regime digital astroturfing follows offline events that spark online discourses with collective action potential. In countering these discourses, regime-linked digital astroturfers exploit social media affordances to discursively cheerlead the regime and devalue regime challengers to create a semblance of popular support for the former. I adopt a mixed-methods approach informed by Contextual Text Coding to examine 14,430 tweets linked to the Royal Thai Army in February 2020 to subject my central propositions to empirical scrutiny. My findings demonstrated that astroturfing efforts on Twitter throughout this period, which discursively cheerleaded the military/autocratic regime of General Prayut Chan-o-cha and devalued their pro-democratic opposition with negative frames, were spurred by a mass shooting incident in the city of Korat that exposed the ruling elites to widespread online backlash. This contribution deepens case-specific knowledge about an understudied case in the literature and also strengthens our understanding about the adaptations of authoritarian legitimation strategies in the digital era and the militarization of social media communication.

中文翻译：

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压制异见：泰国军方寻求在推特上制造民众支持


独裁政权为何以及如何对其民众进行数字化的攻击？随着这些政权越来越多地利用社交媒体来操纵在线政治话语，当前的政治虚假信息文献继续优先考虑冷战范式，重点关注主导西方外交政策优先事项和关切的国家。其规范基础掩盖了其他未充分研究的案例，这些案例也将社交媒体武器化以操纵国内在线话语。与此同时，民族志访谈和大数据方法的发现在理论上仍然与长期以来的政权稳定逻辑脱节。我认为，数字化草皮政权是在线下事件之后引发具有集体行动潜力的在线讨论的。在对抗这些言论时，与政权相关的数字占星者利用社交媒体的可供性，在话语中为政权喝彩，并贬低政权挑战者的价值，从而为前者制造出民众支持的假象。我采用上下文文本编码的混合方法来检查 2020 年 2 月与泰国皇家陆军相关的 14,430 条推文，以对我的中心命题进行实证审查。我的研究结果表明，这一时期推特上的“草皮运动”是由该市发生的大规模枪击事件刺激的，这些活动在话语中为巴育将军的军事/独裁政权喝彩，并用负面框架贬低他们的亲民主反对派。科拉特让统治精英遭到了网上广泛的强烈反对。 这一贡献加深了对文献中待研究案例的具体案例的了解，也加强了我们对数字时代威权合法化策略的适应和社交媒体传播军事化的理解。