Last year, Amnesty International talked Pham Doan Trang, co-founder of Luat Khoa Tap Chi, an independent online legal magazine. Trang explained: “There are hundreds of newspapers, but there is only one chief editor who decides what appears in every newspaper in Viet Nam and that person is the head of the [Communist Party of Viet Nam’s] propaganda department.”
Pham Doan Trang is now one of the country’s prisoner of conscience.
Title: Viet Nam: Let us breathe! Censorship and criminalization of online expression in Viet Nam
Publish Date: November 20, 2020
Publisher: Amnesty International
Excerpt:
In recent years, the Vietnamese authorities have mounted a major crackdown against those who express critical views online. This report reveals how social media users in Viet Nam face the constant threat of arbitrary arrest, prosecution and other forms of harassment in retaliation for exercising their right to freedom of expression online. In addition to state repression, social media users are increasingly faced with arbitrary censorship when they seek to share critical views online. As this report details, some of the world’s largest technology companies – Facebook and Google – are playing an increasingly complicit role in the Vietnamese authorities’ censorship regime.
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