Meta’s Vietnam playbook: comply, delete and keep quiet

In early October, Vietnam’s Ministry of Information and Communications proudly announced a new “achievement”: nearly 11,000 Facebook posts had been removed in the third quarter of 2025, along with 705 YouTube videos and 798 TikTok clips.

According to the state-run Tuoi Tre Online, these contents were deemed “anti-Party, anti-State or harmful to national security.” The government boasted of a 96% compliance rate for its takedown requests by Meta/Facebook, 92% by YouTube and 97% by TikTok.

Those figures underscore how much Vietnam’s digital repression has evolved – and how willing global tech companies are to comply to maintain access to the country’s booming online market.

National security facade

Vietnam’s censorship apparatus has long relied on vague legal provisions like Articles 117 and 331 of the penal code, which criminalize “propaganda against the state” and “abuse of democratic freedoms.” These laws have been used to silence journalists, bloggers and activists for more than a decade.

Now, the same repressive logic has been exported online — with the help of the very platforms that once enabled freedom of expression.

When officials such as Le Quang Tu Do, head of the Department of Broadcasting and Electronic Information, publicly thank Facebook for “cooperating to remove malicious content,” it confirms a disturbing reality: big tech companies are no longer neutral intermediaries; they have become partners in state censorship.

Vietnam’s 96% takedown compliance rate is unusually high, even compared with other authoritarian countries. In democratic nations, social media platforms typically resist or legally challenge state requests that violate international norms on free expression.

In Vietnam, however, Meta and Google rarely disclose any transparency data about such requests. There are no public reports detailing how many posts were removed, on what basis or whether users were notified.

This lack of transparency effectively turns these platforms into an opaque enforcement arm of a one-party government.

Censorship as political preemption

When Vietnamese authorities publicly announced that they could directly contact Meta to shorten the takedown deadline from 24 hours to just 12, the message was unmistakable: this was not about “cybersecurity,” but about tightening control over public discourse ahead of the Communist Party Congress set for January 2026.

This “12-hour removal mechanism” is not merely a technical protocol; it is a political preemption strategy designed to neutralize potential dissent before it spreads. By agreeing to such arrangements, platforms like Meta, Google and TikTok are no longer neutral intermediaries in the flow of information; they have effectively become partners in state-controlled censorship.

The Ministry of Information and Communications has even boasted that “cross-border platforms must remain on duty 24/7 to comply within 12 hours,” a declaration that reveals the true scope of Vietnam’s ambition: to extend its censorship infrastructure beyond its borders with the active cooperation of global technology companies.

Behind every “removed” post is a silenced voice. Independent journalists, environmental defenders and women activists have lost not only access to their audiences but also their safety. In some cases, online takedowns precede offline arrests — digital erasure becomes a precursor to physical persecution.

Vietnam’s partnership with Meta thus raises serious questions about data privacy and user safety. If government agencies can demand bulk content removals, what prevents them from obtaining user information, IP addresses or message histories?

Call for platform accountability

Vietnam is a signatory to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which guarantees freedom of expression under Article 19. By removing thousands of posts without independent legal review, Meta and others are aiding Vietnam’s violation of international law.

Global tech companies must be held to higher standards. At a minimum, they should:

• Publish detailed transparency reports on content takedowns requested by the Vietnamese government.
• Notify users when their content is removed for political reasons.
• Conduct independent human rights impact assessments (HRIA) before complying with censorship demands.

These are not radical demands. They are the bare minimum expected from corporations that claim to defend “community standards” and “free expression.”

Controlled, not cleaned, cyberspace

The Vietnamese government frames censorship as “cleaning cyberspace.” But what it truly cleans is dissent, accountability and public debate.

When a state defines “malicious content” as anything that questions authority, and when Silicon Valley platforms execute that definition without scrutiny, the result is not digital hygiene – it is digital authoritarianism.

Meta, Google and TikTok must decide whether their business model in Vietnam is compatible with human rights, or whether their silence will continue to enable repression behind the algorithmic curtain.

Nguyen Ngoc Nhu Quynh, also known as Mother Mushroom, is a Vietnamese writer, human rights commentator and former political prisoner based in Texas, United States. She is the founder of WEHEAR, an independent initiative focusing on Southeast Asian politics, human rights and economic transparency.