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FINANCIAL TIMES
Vietnam activists accuse Facebook of helping suppress dissent
Protests over takedown policy add to social network’s challenges
in region
John Reed in Ho Chi Minh City
A group of 50 human rights activists and independent media groups in
Vietnam have written to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive,
accusing the social media platform of working with communist authorities
to take down content and suspend accounts.
The open letter adds to a growing wave of controversy Facebook faces in
south-east Asia, one of its fastest-growing regions. It was released
early on Tuesday, hours before Mr Zuckerberg was due to testify before a
US congressional hearing about data leakage.
The protest from Vietnam came even as civil society groups in Myanmar,
who last week accused the social media platform of reacting too slowly
to complaints of dangerous hate speech, released a response from Mr
Zuckerberg in which he apologised and said Facebook had added dozens
more Burmese-speaking reviewers to its staff.
Vietnam’s media and internet operate under censorship, and the country
has jailed numerous bloggers and political dissidents. Last year, the
army announced the creation of Force 47, a 10,000-strong “cyber army”.
The signatories to the letter said “groups of government trolls” were
co-ordinating mass reporting of activists’ accounts, and celebrating
when Facebook took them down. The Vietnamese activists said they had
been in contact with Facebook representatives “often” to try to ensure
content remained online.
“Prior to 2017, your company’s assistance has been fruitful,” the letter
to Mr Zuckerberg said. “Since last year, however, the frequency of
takedown has increased and Facebook’s assistance has been unhelpful in
restoring accounts and content.”
They said that before and during a major trial of Vietnamese human
rights activists this month, “many accounts and pages of high-profile
citizen journalists were prevented from posting”. A court in Hanoi
sentenced six prominent human rights activists to long prison terms.
The letter writers said they were “dismayed” to learn that Monika
Bickert, Facebook’s head of global policy management, had met Truong
Minh Tuan, Vietnam’s minister of information, in April 2017 and
“reportedly agreed to co-ordinate in the monitoring and removal of
content”.
In response, Facebook said that it was “committed to protecting the
rights of the people who use Facebook” in keeping with its community
standards, and to “enabling people to express themselves freely and
safely”.
“We will remove content that violates these standards when we’re made
aware of it,” the company said. “There are also times when we may have
to remove or restrict access to content because it violates a law in a
particular country, even though it doesn’t violate our community
standards.”
Facebook said it had “a clear and consistent government request
process”, which was no different in Vietnam than in the rest of the
world.
Vietnam’s ministry of foreign affairs had no immediate comment.
The Vietnamese letter opens a new front of criticism against Facebook in
Asia. In Myanmar and Sri Lanka, Facebook has been accused of responding
too slowly to hate speech spread on its platform; in the Philippines and
Cambodia, activists say it has allowed supporters of leaders with
authoritarian tendencies to exploit it.
In Vietnam, however, the activists claim Facebook is working with
authorities to prevent “openness and connectivity” in a country where
free speech is suppressed.
Separately on Tuesday, six civil society groups that wrote to Mr
Zuckerberg last week released a letter in which the Facebook chief
executive apologised “for not being clear about the important role that
your organisations play in helping us to understand and respond to
Myanmar-related issues”.
The groups complained last week after Mr Zuckerberg addressed in an
interview an incident in September in which unknown actors used
Facebook’s Messenger platform to send false terrorism warnings to
thousands of people in the south-east Asian country.
In his response, dated April 6, Mr Zuckerberg said that in addition to
employing dozens more Burmese-language reviewers, the company was
building artificial intelligence to help it better identify “abusive,
hateful, or false content even before it is flagged by our community”.
Civil society groups responded by saying that Facebook’s “proposed
improvements are nowhere near enough to ensure that Myanmar users are
provided with the same standards of care as in the US or Europe”.
“When things go wrong in Myanmar, the consequences can be really serious
— potentially disastrous,” the groups said. |