Clip shows flood defence in northern Thailand, not border wall with Cambodia

"Thailand is building walls against Cambodia, reports a Khmer channel," reads Thai-language text on a TikTok video posted on July 15, 2025.

The video, which has garnered more than 460,000 views, appears to show a wall being constructed. It shows concrete slabs being slotted into position by several men wearing camouflage trousers and green shirts adorned with the words "Royal Thai Army".

According to the clip's Khmer-language narration, it shows an 800-kilometre border fence that Thailand was building along its border with Cambodia.

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Screenshot of the false TikTok post captured on July 23, 2025, with a red X added by AFP

Similar posts surfaced elsewhere on TikTok, Facebook and YouTube, as well as in a Khmer-language post after longstanding tensions between the Southeast Asian neighbours escalated into cross-border clashes in late May, with one Cambodian soldier killed.

Numerous border crossings have been closed as Cambodia halted certain Thai imports, and the kingdom's Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra was suspended pending an ethics probe into her conduct after a phone call trying to soothe the spat was leaked by ex-Cambodian leader Hun Sen (archived link).

The neighbours' long-running border spat dramatically escalated on July 24, with Cambodia firing rockets and artillery shells into Thailand and the Thai military scrambling F-16 jets to carry out air strikes (archived link).

Both sides blamed the other for starting the fighting, which erupted near two temples on the border between the Thai province of Surin and Cambodia's Oddar Meanchey.

The clip circulating online, however, was not filmed at the countries' shared border.

Thailand-Myanmar floodwall

A reverse image search on Google using the keyframes from the falsely shared clip and additional keyword searches found a longer version of the video in a Facebook post shared on June 1 (archived link).

Its Thai-language description reads: "Let's take a look at the army engineers from the Department of Military Engineering, Ratchaburi province, laying the piles and inserting the concrete slabs".

"Each slab takes about 3-5 minutes. This spot should be done as soon as next week," it added.

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Screenshot comparison of the falsely shared clip (left) and the video posted on June 1 (right)

The Facebook user regularly publishes videos on the floodwall construction in Mae Sai district of Chiang Rai province in northern Thailand, which borders Myanmar (archived link).

AFP geolocated the footage to an area near a river on the Thai-Myanmar border (archived here and here).

Aerial footage from a July 21 report by public broadcaster Thai PBS shows the same guesthouses, where the floodwalls are reportedly almost complete (archived link).

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Screenshot comparison of the Facebook video from June 1 (left) and a Thai PBS report (right), with corresponding elements highlighted by AFP

Another video published by the Facebook user shows a distinct yellow building downstream and across the river (archived here and here).

The same building is visible in a June 1 report by state media NBT about the construction of riverbank barriers in communities that have been severely affected by flooding (archived link).

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Screenshot comparison of a building seen in a Facebook video posted by the user who shared the original video (left) and a report by NBT on June 1 (right), highlighted in both by AFP

AFP has previously fact-checked other misinformation related to the Thailand-Cambodia border dispute.