Lek Karry has been using a smartphone for nearly two years but the grade 12 student admits she still struggles to distinguish between real and fake information online.
An indigenous Brao from Ke Kuong village in northeastern Ratanakiri province, Karry initially got a smartphone to study online during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. She uses some social media and messaging apps like Facebook and Telegram but says she remains unfamiliar with other well-known apps like Twitter.
Though aware of widespread misinformation on social media, Karry says she finds it difficult to fact-check the news online.
“When there is election news on social media, I check first if other Facebook pages released the same news, or I check the National Election Cambodia’s Facebook page, and then I compare the news item to find the true news on social media,” she said.
Other indigenous youth echo Karry’s concerns. Sev Vannly, a 26-year-old indigenous Jarai, has been using smartphones to access news on social media for nearly a decade but also struggles to assess what information is accurate.
“Sometimes it is true, sometimes it is not,” he said. “Before I used a smartphone, I did not know Facebook and I didn’t know anything. Not many people in my community know about social media, I think maybe only 10% of my community uses smartphones.”
Karry and Vannly are just two of many ethnic minority indigenous people in Cambodia who are vulnerable to online misinformation, even as Cambodia’s July national elections approach.
A report by data aggregator Datareportal shows that Cambodia has more than 22 million mobile phone users and more than 12 million social media users as of January 2022, primarily on Facebook and TikTok. Nearly 18 million people are registered as internet users as of September 2022, according to the Kingdom’s telecommunication regulator.