Vietnam complained of "toxic" anti-government Facebook content, now says Facebook has committed to help censor

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Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/04/26/vietnam-complained-of-toxic.html

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The Western concepts of a free press and state protections for journalists are not supported by the government of Vietnam.

They’re also not supported by the corporate charter of Facebook, or any other company. The First Amendment only applies to Congress, and by extension, state and local government.

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Fake news is certainly not confined to the West. There is a lot of it out here as well. It is making things difficult for countries like Vietnam who often take one step forward and two steps back, but are making progress.

I’m not talking about protest or opposition speech, it’s the equiv of alt-right fake news which frankly is toxic. Here in Cambodia the government, is struggling to deal with the same thing. There is opposition speech, which IS being suppressed but there is also a lot of crap which is just making things worse.

I would also hope that Boing Boing try to be a little more sensitive about using hot words like “communist” which has nothing to do with the story. Vietnam is about as communist as the United States is a democracy (it’s a republic). They’re certainly as hardcore capitalists as China.

It would be better to direct some of that concern towards Thailand, which is under the control of a repressive military Junta, and has some of the strongest censorship in the region. And unlike Vietnam, the US conducts regular military excercises with the Thai military. Which was painfully obvious when I was living next to a runway in Udon Thani and several times a year had the living crap scared out of me when US Worthogs roared off the runway at 6 in the morning with the second hand F-16’s that the US sold to the Thai military.

What really really makes me sad is that Vietnam didn’t have the guts to kick out Facebook all together, it would be an improvement.

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I seem to be banned from FB. I guess it is for not being sufficiently reverent of religious mythology, particularly when people bring it into politics.

It would be interesting to know how many censorship staff FB (eg. , nipple dept.), Google, Twit, etc. have in total.

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