People believed official COVID messaging as long as the government seemed to be winning — once measures failed, belief went with them, however true the message

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Thai social media users kept questioning official messaging. This study asks what trust in government communication actually tracked, whether it moved with approval of the government's disease-control performance, and where people turned — and whom they treated as the final arbiter of truth — once they stopped believing the government.

Social media discourse analysis of Facebook and Twitter posts and comments from early 2020 to early 2022, searched month by month and through the hashtags in use at each stage, combined with 50 expert interviews (fact-checkers, health-information workers, journalists and public relations practitioners, recruited by snowball sampling) between December 2021 and February 2022. The two authors translated the Thai material into English and a research assistant checked coding agreement. Government approval figures were taken from polls and media reports, since no longitudinal dataset exists. The analysis is qualitative and organised around the four waves of the outbreak.

• In the first stage (January–March 2020) official messaging was confused. When those in authority described the virus as “just a cold” while other countries declared emergencies, social media users cited the World Health Organization's guidance instead — until the disease-control authority aligned its messaging with WHO and a single command centre was set up to speak with one voice.
• During the successful lockdown (to mid-2020) credibility peaked and the official line was barely questioned. Thailand was held up as a global example, the daily briefings led by a doctor were trusted, and on masks Thais chose the government over WHO — mask-wearing reached about 90% by late January and almost 95% by mid-March, although WHO was not yet recommending it.
• In the vaccination stage (April–June 2021) credibility collapsed along with performance. The third wave brought 36,650 new cases in April alone, more than the country's entire previous total, while under 1% of the population was fully vaccinated by May. An online petition to remove the official responsible for public health gathered 200,000 signatures in days; the government leader's approval fell from 93.3% to 19%; and the public used WHO and CDC comparisons of vaccine efficacy to contest the government's vaccine choices.
• The direction was the reverse of the West. Where Western sceptics used social media to oppose vaccines, Thai sceptics of the government demanded newer vaccines and blamed the government for not securing them. By the end of 2021, 90.2% had been vaccinated or were willing to be.
• In the response stage (July 2021) the government widened its emergency decree to cover information that “causes public fear” even when true, which was read as silencing rather than solving. Once vaccination got on track late in 2021, people tired of the subject and the discourse faded.
• The authors' conclusion: credibility was a function of approval, not of truthfulness or transparency. While policies appeared to work, official messages went unchallenged and foreign sources were not seen as superior; when performance fell, people went looking for an “arbiter of truth” in international bodies.

For crisis health communication: explaining well is not enough to build credibility when the results people can see point the other way — communication and delivery cannot be separated. When trust falls, people do not stop seeking information; they move to sources they trust more. Official communication that openly grounds itself in, and cites, international bodies can borrow that credibility rather than compete with it. And controlling information at a moment when trust is already low backfires, because it reads as an admission that there is something to hide.