Facebook's self-defeating censorship in Vietnam

Vietnam is threatening again to shut down Facebook due to official perceptions the US social media giant isn’t doing enough to censor content critical of the ruling Communist Party. With an estimated 60 million users, nearly two-thirds of the Vietnamese population is on the social media platform. Facebook releases a biannual transparency report, which indicates that it restricted 834 posts at the request of the Vietnamese government between January and June 2020. The figure represents a big jump from the 121 items Facebook took down at Hanoi’s request during the same six-month period in 2019 and the 77 it censored from July to December 2019. Over that period, popular Facebooker and pro-democracy advocate Nguyen Quoc Duc Vuong was arrested and sentenced to eight years in prison under the 2005 Criminal Code for posting allegedly “anti-state” material. According to the 88 Project, an independent rights group that keeps a thorough database of Vietnamese political prisoners, there has been a surge of similar arrests and prison sentences handed to Vietnamese Facebook users, known locally as “Facebookers”, for “anti-state” posts over the past year.  » Read More