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by runn1ng 2491 days ago
The freedom here is... weird.

There is much more freedom of speech than in China, or compared to other SEA countries (maybe except for Thailand, but that has a military coup every 2 years in average).

There is no censorship of foreign media, internet is basically free. You can say whatever you want and nobody cares, people complain about party and officials on Facebook constantly.

On the other hand, they keep arresting people for public protests (google “formosa protests vietnam”), for crazy numbers of years (10, 20 years for protesting). And there are rumors censorship of internet is coming - they made a new law just this January that will allow them to censor Facebook or Google unless they host data here and give data about citizens to the government. It is a question how will they proceed; the party is similarly opaque to Chinese party.

All in all though, it’s around better than other countries in region on average or China but worse than Europe, US, or even Taiwan

You can complain about Party, but once you start actually organizing protests, they will come knocking. But since the economy is growing so crazy, people are generally happy.

and of course as a white expat you are put on a pedestal here and a bit untouchable. It’s bad but that’s how it is.

1 comments

Correction - some websites are blocked - like bbc.co.uk, but I encountered others. But it's easy to circumvent. The freedom in Vietnam is largely based on the fact that the government doesn't have the means to censor and catch all the small fish. So unless you go on a big public protest, you can basically do whatever you want. Officially, the freedoms are very much limited and yes, internet censorship is on the rise.
BBC seems blocked only on some providers. I can connect to bbc.co.uk now, but bbc.com is DNS blocked.