BANGKOK: New Vietnamese web guidelines requiring Facebook and TikTok to confirm customers’ identities and hand over information to authorities got here into power on Wednesday (December 25), in what critics name the most recent assault on freedom of expression.
According to “Decree 147” all tech giants working in Vietnam should confirm customers’ accounts by way of their telephone numbers or Vietnamese identification numbers and retailer that data together with their full identify and date of start.
They should present that information to authorities upon request and take away any content material the federal government deems “unlawful” inside 24 hours.
The new guidelines got here into power on Wednesday, state media VNExpress reported.
All social media websites got 90 days to offer authorities with information on the “whole variety of common visits from Vietnam” and the variety of common customers per 30 days, the location stated.
“Decree 147 will likely be used to publicly suppress those that have totally different views,” stated activist Dang Thi Hue, who writes about politics and social points on her Facebook account which has 28,000 followers.
The decree was “the most recent signal of violation of elementary freedoms… with a blurred line between what’s authorized and what’s not,” stated former political prisoner Le Anh Hung.
“Nobody needs to go to jail, so clearly some activists will likely be extra cautious and afraid of this decree.”
Vietnam’s hardline administration typically strikes rapidly to crack down on dissent and arrest critics, particularly those that discover audiences on social media.
In October, blogger Duong Van Thai – who had almost 120,000 followers on YouTube, the place he often recorded stay streams crucial of the federal government – was jailed for 12 years on expenses of publishing anti-state data.
Decree 147 is predicated on a 2018 cybersecurity legislation that has been sharply criticized by the United States, the European Union and web freedom advocates who’ve stated it mimics China’s repressive web censorship.
The decree additionally states that solely verified accounts can stay stream, impacting the exponential quantity of people that make a dwelling by means of social commerce on websites like TikTok.
Aside from the results for social media corporations, the brand new legal guidelines additionally embody restrictions on gaming for these below 18, designed to forestall habit.
Game publishers are anticipated to impose a time restrict of 1 hour per gaming session and not more than 180 minutes per day for all video games.
Just over half of Vietnam’s 100 million individuals play these video games often, information analysis agency Newzoo says.
Much of the inhabitants can be on social media, with the Ministry of Information and Communications estimating that the nation has round 65 million Facebook customers, 60 million on YouTube and 20 million on TikTok.
