Placeholder Image

Subtitles section Play video

  • Vietnam has threatened to shut down Facebook in the country if the social media giant refuses to bow to government pressure and censor MAWR political content on its platform.

  • That's according to a senior official at the company, which has faced mounting pressure from governments over its content policies.

  • But it's also faced criticism from rights groups for being too compliance with government censorship requests.

  • Vietnam's ruling Communist Party retains tight control of the media in its country despite opening up to more social change.

  • Facebook's local servers in Vietnam were taken offline early this year until it complied with the government's demands, The Facebook official told Reuters.

  • The company complied with a government request in April to increase censorship of anti state posts for some 60 million Vietnamese users.

  • It then asked the company to step up its restrictions again in August, which the official says Facebook refused.

  • Vietnam is a major market for Facebook, where it generates revenue amounting to nearly a billion dollars.

  • The platform is also a source of scrutiny for the Vietnamese government.

  • As the country's main site for both e commerce and expressions of political dissent, Vietnam has tried to launch homegrown social media networks to compete with Facebook with little success, Amnesty International said the fact Facebook has not yet been banned despite defying the Vietnamese governments threats showed the company could doom or to resist adding that quote they spoke are prioritizing profits in Vietnam and failing to respect human rights.

  • The country ranks fifth from the bottom and a global ranking of press freedom compiled by Reporters Without Borders.

Vietnam has threatened to shut down Facebook in the country if the social media giant refuses to bow to government pressure and censor MAWR political content on its platform.

Subtitles and vocabulary

Click the word to look it up Click the word to find further inforamtion about it