Fake chat screenshot misrepresented as Thai school shooter's message to mother
- Published on August 11, 2026 at 11:42
- 2 min read
- By Nattakorn PLODDEE, AFP Thailand
Following a deadly school shooting on the outskirts of Bangkok on August 7, 2026, social media users shared a fake screenshot purportedly showing a conversation between the shooter and his mother on the LINE messaging app. But an analysis of the circulating image found garbled text and interface elements inconsistent with the messaging platform. A Thai police general told AFP the image was not authentic, saying the phone had been seized by investigators.
"This is what caused the shooting, read this chat," says the Thai-language hashtag on a Facebook post shared on August 8.
It circulated online one day after a deadly school shooting in Nonthaburi province, bordering Bangkok, where a 14-year-old assailant shot dead his grandparents at their home before killing six others at his school (archived link).
The post includes a screenshot that purportedly shows a conversation between a son and mother, where he requests to be transferred to a different school to avoid being bullied.
After being scolded, the son threatens to commit a mass shooting at his house and school.
According to the screenshot, the mom responded: "If you're brave enough then do it, grandfather has a gun in the house."
Superimposed Thai text above the screenshot, which was shared more than 250 times, reads: "This chat is depressing".
Similar claims have circulated elsewhere on Reddit, Instagram, YouTube and Facebook in Thai and Burmese, as social media users speculated on the shooter's motive.
Investigators have interviewed more than a dozen witnesses and were examining the boy's computer and phone to determine the "real cause of the shooting", Atthapol Anusit, a deputy police commander for the region surrounding the capital, told reporters on August 9.
"We looked into his PC and found history that he watched violent videos on social media," Anusit said.
Some commenters appeared to believe the image showed a real conversation between the shooter and his mother.
"I pity the lad, he must have been under so much duress," one user wrote. Another said: "A mother must never speak like this, they shouldn't scold him for this."
However, this is not a genuine screenshot taken from the shooter's phone.
Anusit told AFP in a telephone interview on August 10 that the circulating claim was false, explaining that the shooter's phone had been seized by authorities (archived link).
"This is not a genuine screenshot," he said. "His belongings, which include his phone, are currently being investigated by the Forensic Science Division."
A reverse image search on Google brought up other variations of the same purported conversation, but with differing timestamps.
A close review of the text messages identified typos and garbled Thai text, with inconsistencies seen in the same letters and words -- a characteristic of text fabricated by AI.
Another visual anomaly is the LINE messenger app's user interface.
In the circulating image, the number "99+" appears on the top left corner, which shows the user's unread messages from other chats.
This contradicts LINE's authentic user interface, where unread chat messages are instead displayed on a bottom tab as seen in examples shown in the app's previous redesign announcement introduced on December 8, 2020 (archived link).
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