Photos by Lindsey Newhall

I'd been at a Muay Thai gym in Thailand all of one day before the friend requests started pouring in. Waiting for me not 20 minutes after training were four new friend requests from Thai names I couldn't read. Another foreigner training at the gym looked over my shoulder at the computer screen. "Looks like they found you," he said.

"Are these the fighter kids? I don't even know their names yet," I said. "Do they even know mine?"

"Doesn't matter," he laughed. "Thai fighters will friend anyone."

I clicked on their profiles, looked at their lists of Facebook friends. They each had over a thousand, compared to my paltry 300 or so.

I added them as friends, and within a day had dozens of new notifications that [insert Thai fighter's name here] had "liked" my post. They also "liked" their own posts they’d authored; an action considered silly form in my very dignified American Facebook culture. Some fighters even had multiple accounts, as many as four or five for one person.

Soon I was subject to friend requests from Thais I'd never met, friends of friends of friends, male and female, all ages. Some were fighters, some were students, some were random office workers in Bangkok. I didn't know any of them personally, but in Thailand's Facebook culture, that’s not a barrier to online friendship. In an era of cheap, widely available smartphones, millions of Thais are newly able to access social media, and access it they do.

With hours of downtime in between training sessions and the occasional disposable income from fight purses, Thai fighters in particular are ideal social media users. But in the eyes of the gym, fighters are financial investments. Gym owners constantly struggle with how best to develop and protect their human investments, and smartphones and social media are presenting a new range of challenges all over Thailand's Muay Thai landscape.

Ya Kiatpetch, a well-connected promoter and scout who has been working in the Muay Thai industry for decades, recently opened his own gym in his Isaan home province. Control and discipline, he believes, are cornerstones of running a functional gym, especially in an area of Thailand known for its poverty, gangs, and drug addiction. Part of the control he exerts over his fighters is limiting their smartphone usage. Every night at 10:30, the Ya Kiatpetch fighters are required to surrender their phones. The phones are returned the next day at 9am after morning training, and confiscated again between lunchtime and the conclusion of evening training around 6pm.

According to Ya, maintaining control over his teenage fighters is difficult but the only way to ensure success as a fighter. "Fourteen to 18 is the hardest age to control," he says. "Especially 16. At that age, it's all about girls. But if you can control them, see them through those years, they'll have a good future in Muay Thai."

Ya may control his fighters’ use of phones but he's realistic about their nature. He knows it's inevitable that his fighters will develop romances, or even just simple friendships, in the local community. "My fighters meet girls all the time, even without phones. Girls give them their numbers at fights around here, and they'll call and say, 'Can I meet you outside the gym?'" The teens at Ya’s gym are given a fair share of freedomthey're allowed to leave the gym to see friends or girlfriends most nights between 7 and 10pm.

That's where Ya sees the benefits of fighters having smartphones: it makes it easier for management to track them down if they go missing. The same sentiment was echoed by top fighter Kem Sitsongpeenong, who recently opened his own gym in the faraway mountains of Khao Yai. "The only good thing about [my fighters] having phones is that you can call them when they're out," Kem said. "There's an issue with them meeting girls and running off, but if they have a phone, at least you can find them."

Gym owners have been keeping fighters in line for decades, before smartphones, Facebook, and Line apps became the most popular ways Thai teenagers communicate. Back then, fighters stayed in touch with friends and girlfriends through letters and notes, methods that sound downright innocent today.

"This is a difficult generation," Ya laments while lighting up a cigarette. "You have all these new distractions like phones and these problems like yaba ["crazy medicine," a combination of meth and caffeine]. These things weren't as prevalent or just didn't exist when I was a younger."

Just after lunchtime at Ya's gym, the fighters are settling down for their early afternoon rest, lounging on futons lined up wall-to-wall in one long row. Some kids have already fallen asleep; others are huddled in groups around phones. One of Ya's trainers quietly orders them to put their phones down for the afternoon. The fighters comply, giving their phones directly to the trainer or plugging them into chargers away in the gym's kitchen.

Back outside, Ya huffs as a young fighter rides the gym's motorbike into view.

"You're late," he says sharply.

The child apologizes, keeps his eyes on the ground, and hands Ya a pack of cigarettes and some change.

"Thirty push-ups," Ya orders. Wordlessly the kid drops down while Ya opens his fresh pack.

"Count out loud so I know you're doing them all," he says. He looks back at me, nods toward the kid and says, "I sent him to the store to buy cigarettes but he took too long getting back. He should have been here 15 minutes ago."

"How old is he?" I ask.

"Eleven. He should know better."

Social media may cause headaches for Ya as a gym owner, but as a promoter, Ya loves these modern tools. "Before, if you wanted to get a fight at a big stadium, you actually had to send in an envelope with fighter stats and a history. You had to take a picture, go develop that picture, and physically mail all that to Bangkok to get a fight at Lumpinee."

Now it's all different. Ya uses the Japanese-developed Line app for much of his promotion dealings. He also keeps up-to-date on the Muay Thai world through social media, but admits these sources aren't always reliable. "There are a lot of problems with people doing false advertisements online, like advertising a fight that doesn't happen, or just general lying on Facebook," he says. "People can say anything they want to online. They can make any claims on their Facebook profiles. It's not like a written article in Muay Champ or Muay Siam."

Ya maintains social media and smartphones are valuable primarily for gym owners and promoters, not fighters themselves. "It's a great tool for us. But for the fighters, it holds them back. The only good thing about a fighter having a phone is me being able to call them."

An hour's drive away from Ya Kiatpetch sits Wor. Watthana, a gym tucked away in a tiny village surrounded by rice paddies. This gym’s owner, Canadian Frances Watthanaya, has starkly different views on the value of smartphones in the hands of Muay Thai's rural youth. She believes they can be used to develop skills, autonomy, and as a connection to the outside world.

"Fighters are not necessarily encouraged to be smart, self-sufficient citizens, and I think some gym owners like to keep their fighters ignorant so they can maintain control. But as a gym owner myself, I want to teach the kids new skills," she says, listing things such as online banking, applying for jobs, and the ability to contact fight promoters internationally. "Even just learning about different cultures and news, knowing what's going on outside of their isolated world, that's a benefit of being online. Especially in Thailand, [social media] is a way to communicate with the outside world and learn English."

It requires actual guidance and a willingness to learn for these skills to be imparted, though. Says Frances, "The kids at my gym have an online presence but they're still isolated. They're on Facebook hours a day but they can't do anything online more functional for their lives."

Frances left Canada for Thailand when she was 19 to train in Bangkok. She married a fighter from Isaan and has spent the last nearly 10 years between Canada and her husband Boom's home in rural Isaan. The couple opened Wor. Watthana on Boom’s family’s property a few months ago, largely with the help of a successful crowdfunding campaign.

As someone who maintains a presence on social media, Frances is wary of how her boxers present themselves on the internet. "Fighters need to be aware of how they're viewed online," she says. "These are kids, but they're also professional fighters and they need to be careful, even on their personal pages. I don't know if it's a cultural thing but they just write anything on Facebook, and they're not aware of the possible social consequences. As a gym owner with a lot of young students, and with the success of our GoFundMe and how we've reached thousands of people all over the world, I want to show the kids what a professional online presence can do for their future."

When Wor. Watthana first opened, residents of the community trickled in to watch training sessions. Some locals even participated, helping to train the kids. Others, however, sat on their motorbikes playing games on their phones. Frances made a new rule for fighters and spectators alike—no playing on phones during training sessions. "[Adults playing on their phones] would occasionally distract the fighters, and in general I just didn't like it," Frances says. "We are trying to create a safe space for these kids, a positive, productive environment. I don't want cell phones at my gym, and this was a decision I made from the beginning."

Many young fighters across Thailand lack basic running shoes, punching bags, or gloves with padding still intact, yet most of them seem to have access to smartphones. Nearly a decade ago, when Frances first arrived in Thailand, only older, more established fighters had mobile phones, and those were simply talk-and-text. Now in 2015, smartphones are ubiquitous across Thailand, even in the poorest regions.

"You can get a smartphone for a few dollars now," Frances says. "They price them cheap because they want the kids to play on them and download games. It's a business ploy, a way to make money off the kids every month. The companies think, 'If we can just get a phone in their hands, they'll spend money.' Some of the phones are absolute pieces of shit. No one in the West has phones this shitty."

Frances' husband Boom, who lived in Canada for four years with Frances after they married, wishes he had had a smartphone with internet access when he was growing up. He moved to Bangkok around age 20 and started training with legendary names in Muay Thai, people he'd been hearing about since he was a kid in the rural rice fields of Isaan. A few years later, Boom moved to Canada with Frances and learned how to search for Muay Thai videos on Youtube. He finally saw videos of his Bangkok trainers, fighting in the ring during their primes.

This is a valuable resource for today's young Muay Thai fighters, Boom asserts. "You don't have to wait for the Channel 7 fights [to be broadcast] on weekends. You can study Muay Thai online any time now. This is the great thing about having a smartphone or using the internet. But unfortunately a lot of kids don't use this opportunity to study Muay Thai legends online. They just waste their time playing Facebook."

Eight hundred miles away, down south on the island of Phuket, Num, the manager of Singpatong-Sitnumnoi Gym, has a complicated relationship with his fighters' use of social media and smartphones.

One benefit of social media, according to Num, is as a way to help the young fighters balance personal life with professional life. "We allow the boys to have relationships outside the gym so long as they still focus on fighting," Num says. "It's good for them to talk with other people because it can help relieve the stress of their training lives." The young fighters are permitted to communicate with non-gym friends during certain hours of the day, outside training time. By 9pm, all phones must be put away. “They have to turn them off at night. If we let them keep their phones, they’d never go to sleep.”

Fighters having phones does, however, pose a specific problem—the potential for bribery and throwing fights. I'd heard Kem Sitsongpeenong say the same thing about his fighters up in the Khao Yai mountains. "It's easier to throw fights now that the fighters all have their own phones," Kem said. "The bad guys call them on a burner phone and then toss it so we can't even trace it."

Num has a system in place to combat this. Shortly before a fighter competes in Bangkok, the fighter will often surrender the phone to the gym owner or head trainer. "Every gym does this," Num asserts. "We take the phone from them right after they check weight, or sometimes right before traveling to Bangkok."

What about the days or even weeks leading up to a big Bangkok fight? According to Num, nearly all underhanded arrangements involving throwing fights happen the day of the event. "The person who is trying to bribe the fighter will call as close to the fight as possible because that's how you confirm a deal like this. If they call too much in advance, they know the fighter may have a change of heart."

Like Frances and Boom at Wor. Watthana in Isaan, Singpatong Gym embraces the technology these young fighters grow up learning. Some gyms report using smartphones as an incentive—I spoke to one gym owner who promised fighters a new and highly coveted iPhone if they won 10 Bangkok fights in a row.

Regardless of how gym owners and trainers view social media, the young Thai fighters will continue to love it. For them, it provides connection, company, and a refuge from the daily grind of training. The dozens of "likes" they receive on their posts give them encouragement in what is by all accounts not just a difficult sport but often a painful and uncertain way of life.

Num's daughter Prim, my interpreter at Singpatong, laughed when I asked her to help me research this subject.

"I can tell you one thing about the Thai boys on Facebook," she said. "When they post a photo, a lot of them will write at the end something like, 'What are you waiting for? Like my post!'"

She scrolled through her own phone and showed me goofy pictures the Singpatong boys had put up of themselves and each other, most of which depicted their daily lives outside training. In all the photos, the boys looked happy. And they all had plenty of “likes,” including their own.

Thai-English interpretation by Frances Watthanaya and Prim Parichart Pradburee.

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