Media’s opinion polls in doubt after bot attacks discovered

With the February 8 general election just around the corner, national surveys have been conducted by many media outlets and educational institutions in an attempt to forecast the outcome.

The most favoured among major the political groups are reported to be Bhumjaithai, the People’s party and Pheu Thai, while the most favoured candidates for the premiership are the leaders of those parties.

Among the leading surveys were those conducted by Matichon and Daily News, which have carried out two rounds of polling so far. The survey results were widely reported across the media.

Prap Boonpan, Deputy Managing Director for Digital Media and Technology at Matichon, wrote in his column on January 26, however, that he had uncovered evidence of poll manipulation that had never appeared in online polls prior to the 2023 election.

He noted that poll manipulation does not merely involve mobilising party supporters to participate en masse to boost a party’s score, but “The use of bot technology has been employed to repeatedly vote in polls on a massive scale, artificially inflating the scores of certain political parties,” he wrote.

Prap admitted that, in the 2025-26 polls, the sample groups analysed in both rounds of the ‘Matichon x Daily News’ survey accounted for only about 20–25% of total participants, explaining that “This is because we found that the remaining respondents were bots that had entered the poll to pad the votes.”

For this reason, it can be concluded that one or more political parties has attempted to manipulate the survey in hopes of using the results to influence public opinion and guide mass decision-making.

What he revealed has cast doubt over the validity of the results from both rounds of polls.

The first round was conducted in December, with 93,391 respondents answering two questions, namely which candidate they would like to see as the next prime minister and for which political party they would vote in the upcoming election.

The results show that Yodchanan Wongsawat, the prime ministerial candidate for Pheu Thai, was the most favoured candidate at 39.2%, followed by Natthaphong Ruengpanyawut at 38.8%. Sirikanya Tansakul of the People’s party and Jatuporn Buruspat each received 3.2%.

In terms of party preference, the People’s party ranked first with 45.1%, followed by the New Opportunity party at 3.2% and the Bhumjaithai party at 3.1%.

In the second survey, held earlier this month, Natthaphong topped the list of favoured candidates, followed by Yodchanan, Khunying Sudarat Keyuraphan and Anutin Charnvirakul. This poll involved 28,002 respondents.

Meanwhile, Top News Television announced the cancellation of the results of the second round of its election poll, after detecting coordinated voting by organised groups linked to certain political parties.

Previously, Top News had invited viewers to participate in a survey titled ‘Election 69: Thailand’s Agenda – The People Vote, 2569, Round 2’, held between January 13 and 23.

The broadcaster’s technology department detected irregularities in the voting process that caused statistical distortions inconsistent with reality, rendering the results unreliable and unsuitable for reference.

Further investigation revealed that, although safeguards were in place to prevent bot-driven mass voting, certain IP addresses of external actors were using advanced bot systems.

These systems were used to cast large numbers of votes on the website, producing outcomes that significantly deviated from actual public opinion.