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Tag: Censorship

  • Pham Doan Trang in Voice of America: Vietnamese Critics, Others Slam Journalist’s 9-Year Sentence

    Locals and the international community were outraged with the 9 year prison term received by well-known Vietnamese journalist Pham Doan Trang.

    Title: Vietnamese Critics, Others Slam Journalist’s 9-Year Sentence
    Publish Date: January 6, 2022
    Publisher: Voice of America

    Excerpt:

    HANOI, VIETNAM —

    The Dec. 14 sentencing of Vietnamese journalist Pham Thi Doan Trang, commonly known as Pham Doan Trang, to nine years in prison for “spreading anti-state propaganda” has angered members of the public here as well as observers outside the country.

    Trang regularly published information alleging human rights violations and police brutality. She was arrested in October 2020. She has been one of the most vocal critics of Vietnam’s human rights record in recent years.

    The arrest came just hours after the 24th annual U.S.-Vietnam Human Rights Dialogue in Hanoi.

    “The sentence is too heavy,” said Minh Pham, a media specialist in Ho Chi Minh City who argued that Trang did not deserve such a long sentence.

    “This sort of trial made me more cautious about speaking and expressing my views in the press and on social media in the future. I feel insecure. It is better to avoid talking about political issues, because regardless of the degree of difference in opinion, it will be labeled as an ‘anti-national’ act,” he told VOA.

    Similarly, Oanh Vu, who works in the food and beverage industry, said Vietnam still has a long way to go when it comes to freedom of expression.

    She told VOA, “Trang’s case has become a sad story as we are heading to the end of this year. But anyway, it is optimistic to see some people are still supporting her and other political prisoners as well. They called for donations to give them [the prisoners] Tet gifts, and provide assistance for their families in their absence. It is also a very practical way to support and help.”

    A freelance journalist, who asked not to be named, told VOA he thought Trang’s heavy sentence could be a message to others, since the government may not be able to arrest all the dissidents just because of what they write on social media.

    “I think they may use Trang to warn others … with the hope that other journalists or dissidents will see what happened to Trang and decide to step back,” he said.

    Zachary Abuza, a professor of Southeast Asia studies at the National War College in Washington, also sees a larger purpose in the handling of Trang’s case.

    FILE - Reporters Without Borders (RSF) awarded Vietnamese journalist and blogger Pham Doan Trang a 2019 Press Freedom Prize for Impact, Sept. 12, 2019, in Berlin.
    FILE – Reporters Without Borders (RSF) awarded Vietnamese journalist and blogger Pham Doan Trang a 2019 Press Freedom Prize for Impact, Sept. 12, 2019, in Berlin.

    “The government can’t go and arrest every dissenter or person who makes an anti-government post on Facebook,” he told VOA. “The government is really trying to be very strategic in going after the most influential individuals. They try to figure out who is influencing others and hope that that serves as a deterrent.”

    The Trang case spurred several foreign governments to express concern about the human rights situation in Vietnam, although the country has maintained a good relationship with the United States and the European Union. Currently, Vietnam is trying to persuade EU members to ratify an investment protection agreement, in addition to an EU free trade agreement that has been ratified.

    However, a Dec. 16 statement by the EU spokesperson called for Trang’s release.

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  • Pham Doan Trang in Amnesty International Viet Nam: Let us breathe! Censorship and criminalization of online expression in Viet Nam

    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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    ASA4132432020ENGLISH
    ASA4132432020ENGLISH.pdf
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  • LIV’s Trinh Huu Long in Los Angeles Times: Facebook touts free speech. In Vietnam, it’s aiding in censorship

    Vietnam’s restrictive policy on press, free speech and expression makes Facebook the best alternative platform for citizens to let their voices be heard.  Recently, Facebook blocked and suspended accounts criticizing the government, but Legal Initiatives for VIETNAM co-founder, Trinh Huu Long said much as he dislikes Facebook, he will have to stick with them.

    Excerpt:

    In a country with no independent media, Facebook provides the only platform where Vietnamese can read about contentious topics such as Dong Tam, a village outside Hanoi where residents were fighting authorities’ plans to seize farmland to build a factory.

    Facebook, whose site was translated into Vietnamese in 2008, now counts more than half the country’s people among its account holders. The popular platform has enabled government critics and pro-democracy activists — in both Vietnam and the United States — to bypass the communist system’s strict controls on the media.

    But in the last several years, the company has repeatedly censored dissent in Vietnam, trying to placate a repressive government that has threatened to shut Facebook down if it does not comply, The Times found.

    In interviews, dozens of Vietnamese activists, human rights advocates and former Facebook officials say the company has blocked posts by hundreds of users, often with little explanation.

    A man uses a laptop at a coffee shop in downtown Hanoi.

    Facebook has also barred Hanoi’s critics — including a Southern California-based opposition group — from buying ads to boost readership and has failed to stop pro-government trolls from swamping the platform to get dissidents’ posts removed.

    Instead of using its leverage as Vietnam’s biggest media platform to hold the line against censorship, Facebook has, in effect, become an accomplice in the government’s intensifying repression of pro-democracy voices, critics say.

    Facebook usually restricts posts and users for one of two reasons — violations of its “community standards,” which are rules the company says apply to users worldwide, or “local laws.” Posts in the latter category are blocked in the country where they are illegal but remain accessible elsewhere.

    Access Now, a digital rights group that assists users who believe their Facebook access has been improperly restricted, said the company rarely explains its decisions to block or restore accounts — except to say they violated community standards.

    Trinh Huu Long, a Hanoi critic who lives in Taiwan and runs a nonprofit online magazine called Luat Khoa, said he began exploring other modes of distribution after Facebook repeatedly blocked articles that had nothing to do with Vietnam. But he determined that abandoning the platform would drastically shrink his readership.

    “Facebook is the king in Vietnam,” he said. “Content has to go through Facebook to reach an audience. So, much as I dislike Facebook, I have to stick with them.”

    Read the full article here.

  • Luật Khoa in ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute Perspective: The Political Economy of Social Media in Vietnam

    The Vietnamese government tends to accommodate western social media platforms by trying to enforce their compliance with local rules through regulatory and economic means rather than blocking them altogether.

    Excerpt:

    INTERNET CENSORSHIP IN VIETNAM

    Vietnam got connected to the Internet on 19 November 1997 after long debates within the top leadership about its pros and cons. Although pragmatic considerations of the Internet’s importance to socio-economic and technological development triumphed, how to deal with its potential harms remains a major concern for the CPV.

    When the Internet was introduced to Vietnamese leaders in the 1990s, one of their immediate concerns was that toxic online contents such as pornographic materials would cause moral decay and social problems for the country. In December 1996, in order to convince the top leadership to open up the country to the Internet, officials reportedly had to demonstrate firsthand to members of the CPV Central Committee that they could use a firewall to effectively block pornographic websites. 2 A greater concern for the Party leadership, however, was that the Internet will facilitate the spread of anti-government propaganda and undermine the regime’s monopoly of information. Party conservatives were worried that a more connected society with freer flow of information would ultimately erode the Party’s rule.

    As such, Vietnamese authorities have maintained certain measures of censorship to forestall unwanted consequences, especially by blocking “harmful” websites. So far, the censorship seems to be more political in nature, focusing on websites that provide anti-government propaganda or “sensitive” information unfavourable for the government’s political standing. For example, as of September 2019, while most pornographic websites are freely accessible in Vietnam, many international news websites that provide Vietnamese services, like BBC, VOA, RFI, and RFA, are still blocked. Blogging platforms such as WordPress and Blogspot, which are popular among political activists and government critics, are also put behind a firewall. Some independent, private-run websites which carry news article or analyses deemed hostile to the government, such as Dan Luan, Luat Khoa, and Boxitvn, are also blocked. However, censorship does not seem consistent across all Internet services providers—some blocked websites or platforms may still be accessible to some users.

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    ISEAS Perspective 2019 77
    ISEAS_Perspective_2019_77.pdf
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