When People Stop Believing the Government

What is it about?

We used Thailand as a case to show that whenever the situation worsened, the approval ratings went down and the skepticism about the competence of the authorities increased, and the public would question the official narrative and look for verification or rebuttal of the government messages. In most cases, the international authorities were referred to as the ultimate source of truthful information.

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Photo by Martin Sanchez on Unsplash

Photo by Martin Sanchez on Unsplash

Why is it important?

We have found correlations between public trust in the credibility of official messaging and public support for the authorities delivering the messages. The analysis demonstrates that as long as the government’s efforts were generally seen as successful, the public was more likely to accept the official messages as true; however, whenever the levels of government’s actions approval decreased, the skepticism about the truthfulness of official messages went up, with netizens turning to Western sources of information (for example, U.S. CDC or WHO) in search for the ultimate truth.