Vietnam Accuses Facebook of Violating Cybersecurity Law

Vietnam has accused Facebook of violating a recently implemented Internet security law, after it allowed users to publish anti-government content.

According to Reuters, Facebook was accused of violating the law “days after the controversial legislation took effect in the communist-ruled country.”

“The ministry said Facebook also allowed personal accounts to upload posts containing ‘slanderous’ content, anti-government sentiment and defamation of individuals and organizations,” Reuters reported, adding that the social network also “refused to provide information on ‘fraudulent accounts’ to Vietnamese security agencies.”

A spokesman for Facebook responded to the news by declaring, “We have a clear process for governments to report illegal content to us, and we review all these requests against our terms of service and local law.”

According to TechCrunch, the Vietnamese law “forbids internet users from organizing with, or training, others for anti-state purposes, spreading false information, and undermining the nation state’s achievements or solidarity,” and “requires foreign internet companies to operate a local office and store user information on Vietnamese soil.”

In an article, Vietnamese outlet Vietnam News claimed the “Ministry of Information and Communications (MIC) is considering preventing cash flowing into hatred advertising on Facebook and collecting taxes to deal with the social network’s violations of laws.”

“Management agencies had sent emails repeatedly asking Facebook to remove distorted and misleading content. However, the social networking giant had delayed removing the content, saying it did not violate its community standards,” Vietnam News proclaimed, adding that the social network “allowed users to buy ads to spread false information, defame organisations, individuals and businesses.”

In 2017, a New York Times contributor accused Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg of using Serbia as a “laboratory” for censorship, as part of an “experiment” in several countries, including Cambodia.

“My country, Serbia, has become an unwilling laboratory for Facebook’s experiments on user behavior — and the independent, nonprofit investigative journalism organization where I am the editor in chief is one of the unfortunate lab rats,” declared Dojcinovic. “Last month, I noticed that our stories had stopped appearing on Facebook as usual. I was stunned. Our largest single source of traffic, accounting for more than half of our monthly page views, had been crippled. Surely, I thought, it was a glitch. It wasn’t.”