The passage of Decree 157, which adds verification requirements for social media accounts in Vietnam, has caused a stir amid claims this will be used to identify distributors of content deemed ‘anti-state’. This may be true, but it seems unlikely this is the actual intent of these new regulations, with several much more pressing issues plaguing social media in Vietnam.
In September of last year, a fire tore through an apartment building in Hanoi killing 56 people. In the first instance, it was widely reported in the mainstream news media that this had been caused by an electric scooter. Overnight, however, the story changed and the electric scooter became a gasoline scooter with an electrical fault in its battery.
But whereas this might have meant a retraction or an explanation most media outlets simply added the word gasoline and republished the very same article.
In fact, the revised article on the English language Vietnam News website still holds the remnants of the old article in its URL: “…electric-scooter-behind-tragic-fire-that-killed-56…” it reads.
In lieu of clarity and amid confusion, it was no surprise then that, for better or worse, people turned to social media for more information. It was here that the electric scooter narrative continued to hold its own leading to a series of restrictions on electric bike charging in Hanoi to the ire of electric bike riders all over the city.
This anecdote, however, only scratches the surface of just how deeply embedded in Vietnam’s very functioning social media has become and this is important to understand in order to properly contextualise Vietnam’s verification requirements for social media accounts.
For example, during the pandemic social media allowed official government communications to be disseminated far and wide and quickly, with key announcements often posted on platforms like Facebook at the same time as they were distributed to the local press. Not to mention, it was more reliable on a technical level (and still is) than many government websites which are often slow to load, if they load at all.
This reliability, coupled with the fact that it is free, has also seen social media become the go-to means of establishing an online presence for many businesses as opposed to building their own website which comes with set-up costs, and domain name registration and hosting fees.
In fact, businesses en masse have been selling goods through their social media accounts for years. Of note, a Research and Markets report found that the gross merchandise value of goods sold through social media in Vietnam last year was US$3.26 billion (around 1 percent of Vietnam’s GDP) and could reach as much as US$17.55 billion by 2029–though with much of this trade unreported it’s difficult to know just how accurate this estimate might be.
And it’s herein that public discourse around Decree 157 probably more aptly fits.
Specifically, people are handing over a lot of money to other social media users they don’t really know through transactions that take place in private chats paid for with bank transfers or cash, neither of which are so easily tracked. This presents a number of challenges.
For one, collecting taxes from vendors. Vietnam’s Ministry of Finance has repeatedly urged businesses selling goods through social networks to register with the tax office and pay their taxes. However, enforcing tax collection on these largely hidden transactions has proven easier said than done. This extends beyond tax evasion as well.
Social media has also become a key recruitment tool for any number of scams (*cough* crypto *cough*) and frauds.
In fact, according to the Ministry of Finance of 1,500 cases of fraud investigated in 2023, just 25 percent could be prosecuted because, in the other 75 percent of cases, the authorities were unable to identify the offenders.
Moreover, as a marketing channel, social media has been used to sell goods with questionable health claims that have led to adverse health outcomes for consumers. The anonymity of social media, however, has given purveyors of these bogus products the ability to simply delete their social media account and open a new one under a different name to do it all over again in a matter of minutes.
The point here is that the verification of social media accounts looks to be addressing a number of problems that do not connect to identifying persons posting content critical of the state. Moreover, as a solution to these problems account verifications have merit. It costs Vietnam basically nothing to implement and allows consumers to make informed decisions hopefully preventing frauds before they occur and therefore taking at least some of the pressure off law enforcement.
That’s not to deny that these new verification requirements could be used to track down government critics. This assessment, however, does seem to be somewhat at odds with reality.
Firstly, it seems unlikely that someone would go to the trouble to set up a fake social media account to avoid detection but that they would fail to use a VPN. Moreover, the kinds of discussions that might draw the ire of the ruling elite tend to take place in forums that are illegal anyway.
But more to the point, looking at Meta transparency data, it doesn’t look like this is how the authorities identify perpetrators anyway.
In 2023, the Vietnamese government made 22 requests for data from Meta including 10 legal requests, as in part of a police investigation, and 12 emergency requests, as in someone was in physical danger. Of those requests, none of the legal requests were granted with ‘some data’ provided in just 7 of the 12 emergency requests.
For contrast, during the same period, US authorities made 147,346 requests with at least ‘some data’ produced for 130,163 of those requests.
With this in mind, whatever the intent of these new regulations, the reality is that, practically speaking, verification requirements aren’t likely to make that much of a difference to what is and is not said on social media. They may, however, add a layer of protection for consumers in the first instance and in the second make it easier to hold nefarious actors to account and subsequently act as a deterrent, which might actually be a good thing.
All of that is to say, that though there is most definitely a discussion to be had around what speech is and is not permitted and how that is determined and policed, it doesn’t look to be here. Moreover, jumping on this narrative at every opportunity risks creating a boy-who-cried-wolf-type scenario whereby when something really significant does happen in this space it may well end up being ignored.