Cambodia’s Prime Minister Ditched Facebook, But His Followers Aren’t Following Him

“I have decided to stop using Facebook, on which I have more than 14 million followers,” Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen told his followers on Telegram last week. The announcement came just hours after the Oversight Board of Meta, Facebook’s parent company, recommended his account be suspended. But before Facebook could break up with him, the 70-year-old strongman ruler swiftly ditched the platform first. Now, however, it seems like Hun Sen is finding it hard to recreate his popularity elsewhere. While his Telegram channel, launched in May last year, has amassed close to a million followers, his one-week-old TikTok account sits at just about 100,000 followers—both a far cry from what he had with Facebook. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Read More: 40 Years After the Fall of the Khmer Rouge, Cambodia Still Grapples With Pol Pot’s Brutal Legacy Once a prolific Facebook user, the Prime Minister regularly broadcasted his daily life and political activities to 14 million followers on the platform—a whopping audience, though he faced allegations of buying likes to boost his profile. Now, in perhaps a sign of desperation, the strongman appears to be resorting to unconventional measures to boost his following. On Thursday, Hun Sen requested to meet the owner of a TikTok account dedicated to posting content about him—one of several such accounts that have significantly more followers than he has himself—saying that he “may take control of the unofficial account as the followers of it are his fans anyway,” the pro-establishment newspaper Khmer Times reported. Here’s what to know about the situation. Why exactly did Hun Sen Leave Facebook? Last week, Meta’s independent internal review committee advised Facebook to suspend Hun Sen over a video he posted in January.