The Ministry of Information and Communications has announced the outcome of an investigation of TikTok’s practices in the country finding a number of breaches of Vietnamese law, VN Economy is reporting. Most of the breaches relate to the censoring of content on the platform and the removal of sensitive content. The MIC does, however, also point out that TikTok’s local offices are not actually imbued with any authority by TikTok but rather the services provided in Vietnam are delivered via TikTok’s Singapore operations (It sounds a lot like TikTok’s local offices are just for show).

Note: This last point is probably the most interesting. Whereas laws have been put in place to force cross-border service providers to open local offices and store data locally, few have done so, and none of the big US firms. This investigation was seen as a test case of these new laws, with the MIC stating when it initiated the investigation that it had chosen TikTok because TikTok was the only cross-border service provider that had opened a local office. These latest findings are unlikely to encourage other firms to follow suit and may actually highlight the limitations of Vietnam’s regulations for cross-border service providers.