Introduction

The authorities in Vietnam have never ceased to fret over “toxic content” (nội dung xấu độc) on the Internet; and indeed the definition of “toxic content” has shifted over the years. In the 1990s, “toxic content” was mostly associated with pornography. In December 1996, for example, in order to convince the authorities to allow for the arrival of the Internet in Vietnam, its advocates reportedly had to prove to Vietnam’s top leaders that pornographic websites could be effectively blocked. They succeeded, and the Internet was officially launched in Vietnam a year later, but on condition that the World Wide Web was placed under state scrutiny and censorship. The stated need to censor pornographic content, however, masked a greater concern of the powers that be, and that was that the Internet would open the floodgates for anti-government propaganda and facilitate a freer flow of information, which would end up posing major threats to the Communist Party.

This fixation on anti-state content shaped the way Vietnamese authorities deployed various censorship strategies aimed at the goal of projecting some level of openness while maintaining a tight grip on online discourses. Like China, Vietnam also hoped to rein in the Internet from the outset. But while Beijing was able to erect a system that is now more akin to a nationwide intranet than the Internet, Hanoi’s more ambivalent approach bred a hybrid infrastructure that keeps developing and that evolves faster than the government’s ability to regulate and control it.

The Internet and social media being a threat started haunting Vietnamese authorities in the mid-2000s, when informal groups of intellectuals, retired government officials, professors, students, writers and independent activists took great strides in mustering up the power of the blogosphere to rail against government thinking and policy. Such threats probably became more manifest during the Arab Spring, when uprisings, fuelled by social media, forced Vietnam’s leaders to acknowledge the possibility of a similar revolution breaking out in the country.

This paper examines how over the past two decades, from the import of the Internet in Vietnam to the blossoming era of social media, the Vietnamese government has justified employing various online censorship tactics at different junctures to crack down on perceived anti-state content.