July 11, 2023 Australian man Chau Van Kham has been released from a Vietnamese prison and reunited with his family in Australia. Mr Chau, a
When Facebook took off in Vietnam about a decade ago, it was like a “revolution,” said two of the company’s early employees in Asia. For the first time, people across the country could communicate directly about current affairs. Users posted about police abuse and government waste, poking holes in the propaganda of the ruling Communist Party. “It felt like a liberation,” said one of the Facebook employees, “and we were part of it.”
June 20, 2023 Đồng Hành Network and Phan Bội Châu Youth Association organized a roundtable discussion on internet freedom in Vietnam to address the Vietnamese
Every year, around April 30th (the date of the fall of Saigon and the end of the Vietnam War), Viet Tan’s social media accounts are targeted by cyberattacks from Vietnamese state trolls. This year, the trolls launched their offensive as early as April 28th, and it lasted until May 5th.
Dear High Commissioner for Refugees,
We are writing to express our concern about the safety and wellbeing of Vietnamese refugees and asylum seekers in Thailand, who are at risk of abduction and refoulement by agents of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.
Force 47 abuses Facebook’s safety tools to silence government critics at home and anywhere in the world. The military-backed group manipulates Facebook’s moderation tools to silence dissenting speech.
A prominent YouTuber, Duong Van Thai was reportedly abducted in Bangkok on orders from the Vietnamese government and forcibly returned to Vietnam. The incident is believed to have occurred around April 14, 2024 — the same day that US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, arrived in Hanoi.
Vietnam has deployed an army of online trolls and cyber troops who are spreading not just disinformation but also conducting vicious hate campaigns against human rights activists and suspected critics of the state.
The extent of the operations of these trolls is detailed in a new report released by the human rights watchdog Viet Tan.
On 28 February 2023, MEP Marianne Vind (S&D, Denmark) hosted a conference to discuss the state of play two years into the entry of the EVFTA at the European Parliament in Brussels, Belgium. The EVFTA (EU-Vietnam Free Trade Agreement), signed on 30 June 2019, aims to strengthen human rights, freedom of assembly and labour rights in Vietnam, and give Vietnam frictionless trade access to Europe.
Today, the international community agrees that the People’s Republic of China is carrying out increasingly aggressive actions in the Indo-Pacific region, particularly in the South China Sea. These hostilities began 49 years ago with the Chinese invasion of the Paracel islands (Hoàng Sa) on January 19, 1974, under Vietnamese sovereignty.
Facebook has revolutionized how we consume, create, and share information. But it has also increasingly become a tool to suppress the very freedom of expression it was meant to promote, as political actors have manipulated the platform to curtail dissent and harass opponents.
In a new report titled “#StopVNtrolls — Combatting Force 47 and Cyber Censorship”, Viet Tan exposes the harmful networks that have been responsible for coordinated social harm and supressing public discourse in Vietnam. The paper provides recommendations to Meta in order to cultivate a safe and authentic online environment.
