With Social Media, Vietnam’s Dissidents Grow Bolder Despite Crackdown

With Social Media, Vietnam’s Dissidents Grow Bolder Despite Crackdown
The government has strategically cut access to Facebook when protests are expected, and earlier this year asked both Facebook and YouTube to help it eliminate fake accounts and other "toxic" content, like anti-government material, saying it had identified up to 8,000 YouTube videos
that fit that description, according to the local newspaper Tuoi Tre.
"They see the situation is too dangerous for them,
and they see peaceful activists as a very dangerous enemy." In a report released last month, Human Rights Watch detailed what it called a "disturbing trend" of bloggers and activists being beaten on the street by thugs known as "con do." It tallied 36 such attacks from January 2015 to this April, only one of which the police investigated.
By JULIA WALLACEJULY 2, 2017
HANOI, Vietnam — A prominent blogger and environmental activist in Vietnam was sentenced last week to 10 years
in prison on charges of national security offenses, including sharing anti-state propaganda on social media.
Jonathan London, a Vietnam specialist at Leiden University in the Netherlands, said
that despite recent repression, the transformation wrought by the internet in a short period had been "astonishing and hopeful." It is "remarkable that in a country that as recently as 15 or 20 years ago had one of the lowest rates of telephone usage in the world has thrust rapidly into an era of 24-hour news and continuous social and political criticism accessible to everyone," he said.
" Mr. Tuyen said. that Here’s news from one of my friends, a doctor in Saigon, who just heard the news that Mother Mushroom is in debt,
Vietnam’s Facebook users — who now number 45 million, almost half the country’s population — use the site to organize prison visits
and vigils outside police stations for detainees, and to solicit donations for political prisoners.