8 - Social Media’s Challenge to State Information Controls in Vietnam

Summary

Commentators often equate Vietnam's internet freedom as similar to China. Indeed, the West regularly includes Vietnam on its “state enemies of the internet” list, as it does for China, Iran, or Syria (Deutsche Welle 2013). There is some truth to the concerns of Vietnam looking towards China as a model, given how ideologically, politically and economically aligned Hanoi is with Beijing. Vietnam is embracing Chinese hardware and packages of security software to increase its technical and infrastructural capabilities for information controls (Sherman 2019). A prominent example to justify this observation is Vietnam's passage and enforcement of the 2018 Cyber-Security Law, which bears striking resemblances to a similar Chinese law (Trinh Huu Long 2017) which gives the government carte blanche to strictly police the internet, scrutinize personal information, censor online discussion, and punish or even jail dissidents.

While Vietnam sees China as a potential example to follow, I argue in this chapter that due to political, economic and technical reasons, Vietnam has only selectively taken a page out of the Chinese playbook in online censorship. Even in an authoritarian state like Vietnam, some measure of popular support is crucial to a regime's longevity, forcing the authorities to occasionally appear responsive, not just repressive, to public sentiment online. Vietnamese internet users, well aware of this grey area, have capitalized on the power of social media to successfully sway the political decision-making process for the public's sake. The 2014–15 period marked the beginning of digital activism in Vietnam that resulted in rare victories for the environment in a country where natural conservation is often dwarfed by economic development. This momentum has enabled social media users to continue testing the waters of what is allowed and not allowed within Vietnam's online sphere.

Unlike China, Vietnam's popular social media platforms are foreignowned, making it more difficult for the state to exert the kind of controls and restrictions its Chinese counterpart could on their homegrown social media. In an unlikely move, Vietnamese authorities have also shown signs of tolerating, embracing or even co-opting social media, chiefly Facebook, to deploy their disinformation campaigns.