Policy uncertainty and public sentiment in the digital era: evidence from Thailand’s Digital Wallet policy

Policy uncertainty in government digital initiatives frequently fuels backlash and erodes public trust, yet real-time empirical studies remain scarce. This research investigates how policy uncertainty influenced public sentiment and perceived trust regarding Thailand’s Digital Wallet policy, a flagship welfare initiative marked by ambiguity. Applying a five-dimensional uncertainty typology (fiscal, temporal, technical, procedural, and distributive), the study uses supervised machine learning to analyze 14,448 YouTube comments from June 2023 to September 2024. Results reveal a highly volatile landscape overwhelmingly dominated by negative sentiment (79%), which fluctuated sharply in response to 104 identified uncertainty events rather than following a linear trend. Crucially, distributive and procedural ambiguities, specifically regarding eligibility and project conditions, elicited the strongest hostility, as citizens interpreted these shifts as breaches of fairness. Conversely, technical implementation issues generated comparatively lower antagonism. These findings demonstrate that persistent uncertainty transforms specific policy dissatisfaction into broader political cynicism. Ultimately, in emerging economies, technical infrastructure cannot compensate for communicative ambiguity; governments must adopt affective literacy through transparency and anticipatory communication to sustain digital-era legitimacy.