Vietnam ARTICLE 19 Country context Vietnam’s censorship and surveillance apparatus is nowhere near as comprehensive as China’s, but the government appears to have ambitions to develop a similar system. In the meantime, it still has fairly sophisticated technical surveillance capacity and, combined with offline surveillance and arrests and imprisonment of critics, the country presents a highly repressive environment for freedom of expression. The government controls the telecommunications infrastructure in the country, which is mostly in the hands of state- and military-owned telecommunications companies, giving it the power to restrict access to the internet. Vietnam has engaged in tactics such as throttling internet access during protests and prominent trials and slowing Facebook services in an effort to compel Meta to increase content removal.108 Foreign media websites and websites hosting political or human rights content are also routinely blocked in the country. One study documented more than a thousand inaccessible websites, more than half of which were hosting political criticism or news media, during the first half of 2022. 109 Government ministries themselves report blocking thousands of websites annually. 110 Where it cannot technically control content, Vietnam uses human beings to monitor social media and attempt to shape the online narrative. In 2017, the Vietnam military announced the formation of a ‘Force 47’ division, supposedly incorporating 10,000 ‘cyber-troops’ responsible for promoting pro-government content. 111 Parallel citizen volunteer units of ‘opinion shapers’ also exist, although the precise relationship of these groups to government entities is unclear. Because Vietnam lacks the resources that China has to exercise absolute control over the internet, it has instead used ‘public opinion shapers’ to control public perceptions of the government through, in part, maintaining a strong presence in the comments section of social media accounts and flooding pages with pro-government messages to create the illusion of support.112 These monitors also target or harass critics and activists, both online and by reporting them to the police.113 Vietnam also uses the criminal law as a censorship tool. Amnesty International has said that more than 40% of prisoners of conscience in Vietnam (as of 2020) were imprisoned solely for their social media use.114 Vietnamese activist organisation the 88 Project counted 178 ____________________________________________ 108 M. Caster, Vietnam: Confronting Digital Dictatorship, ARTICLE 19, 12 September 2023. Independent researchers (anonymous), K. Koh, and S.N. Samsudin, iMAP State of Internet Censorship 2022 – Vietnam, OONI, 23 December 2022. 110 Freedom House, Freedom on the Net 2022: Vietnam and Freedom on the Net 2023: Vietnam (both citing Vietnamese-language government sources). 111 J. Pearson, Insight: How Vietnam's ‘influencer’ Army Wages Information Warfare on Facebook, Reuters, 9 July 2021. 112 Viet Tan, #StopVNtrolls: Combatting Force 47 and Cyber Censorship, 30 January 2023. 113 S. Biddle, Facebook Lets Vietnam’s Cyberarmy Target Dissidents, The Intercept, 21 December 2020. 114 Amnesty International, Viet Nam: Tech Giants Complicit in Industrial-Scale Repression, 1 December 2020. 109 31