Cambodian PM Hun Sen accused of using click farms to gain Facebook friends

ABC News | 10 March 2016

Photo: Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen is now leading the political social media charge. (AFP: Tang Chhin Sothy)
 

The Cambodian Prime Minister has been accused of buying Facebook friends, with a report showing only 20 per cent of his new followers were from Cambodia.

The Cambodian Government has not explained the suspicious origins of hundreds of thousands of Hun Sen's online friends, but one commentator said it fit a pattern of purchasing political support.

Sebastian Strangio, a journalist based in Phnom Penh and the author of Hun Sen's Cambodia, said the role of social media as an election strategy made its debut during the 2013 election.

This raised a lot of questions and doubts in some people's minds about whether these likes were real or whether they were somehow purchased.

Sebastian Strangio, author of Hun Sen's Cambodia

During that election, he said the opposition's strong performance was partly credited to young, internet-savvy voters.

"When the opposition [was] shut out of the government-controlled media, [they] turned to the internet and they scored significant gains in the election, I think they caught the CPP napping," he said.

But Strangio said the ruling Cambodian People's Party (CPP) quickly woke up, with Mr Sen leading the social media charge.

"He's become like a born-again social media convert, he's spending a lot of his time taking selfies with people, posting them on his page, positing photos of his family," Strangio said.

"Basically Hun Sen is trying to use Facebook to present a softer image to the Cambodian people and to smooth down the rough edges on his very pugnacious aggressive public persona."

Strangio said Mr Sen's online popularity quickly surged.

"He's gone from about one million likes to three million, rapidly surpassing his rival Sam Rainsy," he said.

"This raised a lot of questions and doubts in some people's minds about whether these likes were real or whether they were somehow purchased."

Those doubts were then bolstered by a report in the Phnom Penh Post newspaper.

The paper used data collected by social media analytics website Social Bakers, and found that only 20 per cent of Hun Sen's new followers in the last month were from Cambodia.

A quarter of a million were from India, 100,000 from the Philippines and 26,000 from Brazil.

While there is no absolute proof, the implication is that the new followers were bought, using so-called click farms.

Jinn Powprapai, an expert in digital trends and based in Thailand, said a click farm is where you have a large amount of people being paid to click on certain things.

"In terms of effectiveness, it's not really good," he said.

"You have fake people as your friends and your engagement will be very, very low because they're not really your friends."

Phay Siphan, a spokesman for Cambodia's Government, said that there was "no point in buying Facebook friends because it's only the election that counts".

However Strangio said there was a link between hustling for Facebook friends and votes.

"The old modus operandi of the CPP is to distribute patronage in exchange for votes. In the west we might call it vote-buying, but in Cambodia it's pretty much the way things have been done for a very, very long time and it's not seen that way," Strangio said.

"But if Hun Sen is purchasing likes, that would fit very much within this pattern of purchasing support."