Vietnam’s Decree 147: Cybersecurity or Control?

On December 25, new laws went into effect in Vietnam that have significantly tightened the government’s control over social media and the online space. Under Decree 147, issued in November, offshore service providers such as social media companies and foreign app stores are now required to authenticate Vietnamese users by demanding their phone or ID card numbers.

The decree has also tightened the government’s control over online information for reasons of “national security” and “social order,” and to prevent transgressions of Vietnam’s “morals, beautiful customs, and traditions.” In addition, it requires social media platforms to remove anything the authorities request within 24 hours.

Decree 147 is the latest of three decrees that have refined and sharpened the implementation of the Cybersecurity Law that the government passed in 2018, which prohibits the use of cyberspace to “oppose the state, [or] spread false information that causes public confusion, offends others, [and] violates national security.”

Decree 27, which has been superseded by Decree 147, expanded the scope of information that should be monitored by social media networks. Decree 53, which came into effect in late 2022, provided greater detail on data localization requirements for foreign companies, and stipulated that the latter must comply with censorship requirements and provide user data, including names, phone numbers, and dates of birth, to the Vietnamese government when the latter alleges a violation of the Cybersecurity Law.

Naturally, the Vietnamese authorities have framed the latest decree in terms of the need to combat scams and other forms of online crime. “Account authentication helps authorities identify the real identity behind the account, providing good support for the investigation and handling of violations,” Nguyen Tien Ma of the Communication Ministry’s Department of Cyber ​​Security told local media at the time of the decree’s announcement.

But given that the ruling Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV)’s tendency to define terms like “crime” and “national security” in capacious terms, human rights groups argue that the practical effect of Decree 147 will be to rob dissidents of the anonymity that they have long used to post critical comments online. The decree also requires social media platforms to provide user data to the authorities on demand, thus potentially exposing anyone brave enough to post critical comments or anti-government sentiment on Facebook or YouTube.

“Because the Vietnamese police treat any criticism of the Communist Party of Vietnam as a national security matter, this decree will provide them with yet another tool to suppress dissent,” Patricia Gossman, associate Asia director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement last month.

The request is just the latest sign of the CPV’s desire to impose order on the country’s flourishing and freewheeling online information sphere, which has long functioned as an agora and channel of communication for dissidents, political activists, and independent journalists. Unable or unwilling to block these platforms outright, as its counterpart in China has succeeded in doing, the CPV authorities have used the law to ensure that online discussions do not stray beyond tightly circumscribed boundaries.

One of the primary means has been to put pressure on social media networks to remove politically sensitive content – a flipside to the political clampdown that has seen dozens of independent journalists and human rights defenders arrested and sentenced to heavy prison terms. Under the 2018 cybersecurity law, Meta (the parent company of Facebook and Instagram) and Google are required to take down posts deemed to be threats to national security within 24 hours of receiving a government request.

Decree 147 expands the scope of content supervision, putting an even greater onus on foreign tech companies and social media platforms to monitor and remove content that the government deems “illegal” under Vietnam’s elastic legal definitions. For any foreign companies that fail to comply adequately with these regulations, the Vietnamese government has threatened to impose “technical measures,” such as blocking content, services, or apps in the country.

It is at this point that the commercial imperatives of the big tech firms begin to diverge from their loftier missions of promoting openness, “connection,” and so forth. Given Vietnam’s importance as a digital market – the country has the seventh-largest national pool of Facebook users in the world and the and fifth-largest on TikTok – there is a strong commercial incentive for tech giants to accede to government requests to remove  “offensive” or “illegal” content.

Indeed, the amount of content blocked by Meta has increased steadily over the past few years, as the Vietnamese government has tightened its laws governing the internet. Last month, Meta announced that it had blocked more than 3,280 pieces of content from being viewed in Vietnam in the first half of 2024. This followed around 4,810 in the whole of 2023 and around 2,104 in 2022.

According to Vietnamese government statistics cited last month by Radio Free Asia, Facebook, Google, and TikTok censored more than 15,000 pieces of content deemed to be “anti-Party and anti-state” in 2024. The statistics noted that the three companies had complied with more than 90 percent of the government’s requests.

In the current Vietnamese political landscape, following the accession of the country’s former minister of public security, To Lam, to the leadership of the CPV, there is a good chance that this number will continue to creep upward in the years to come. The authorities will continue to refine and streamline the methods that they use to harmonize the interests of the big tech firms with their own. As Nguyen Khac Giang and Dien Nguyen An Luong wrote in an article for the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in 2023, “Vietnamese authorities have become increasingly adept at exploiting their economic leverage to arm-twist Big Tech into compliance.”