Hanoi said it will “strictly punish” companies that advertise on such sites, a move campaigners fear will add to a climate of less “free expression than ever”.
Companies “must not place ads on content that is toxic, against the state, or infringing copyrights”, a post on the information ministry website said last week. The ministry’s authority of broadcasting and electronic information shared a similar post warning against content that is “untrue, obscene, contrary to traditions, sensational, or clickbait”.
It said Vietnam also will unveil a whitelist of sites that are safe for ads in early 2023.
The move targeting advertisers adds to existing measures to stamp out online content the government deems offensive.
The government has cyber “troops” whose job is to scrub the internet of dissent and it has been working for years to persuade technology giants to join in the effort. Vietnam, which has imprisoned critics of the government, requires businesses to store data locally, hand over user data on request and block unfavourable content.
Tech platforms already have had to deal with an advertiser backlash over how their proprietary algorithms assign ads. Advertisers worry their commercials may end up airing alongside sensitive political content, for example, or tucked into videos spreading Covid misinformation.
Meta, the owner of Instagram and Facebook, has enacted “brand safety controls that businesses can use to prevent their ads from running alongside certain types of content on our platforms”, a spokesperson told Nikkei Asia.
The internet’s biggest social network also faced global pressure this week, when its oversight board said Facebook’s content moderation allowed offensive speech by celebrities, at times for “business reasons”, without fully guarding human rights, such as deleting an artist’s post against hate. Meta said it would respond to the long-awaited report within 90 days.
But concessions back in Vietnam have not allayed the concerns of officials who accuse platforms of tolerating “illegal” content.
“YouTube and Facebook allow social media users to post rampant illegal content and enable the monetisation feature that allows ads to be installed on those channels, pages, and accounts,” said Vietnam’s broadcasting authority post, which was first published by the information ministry’s newspaper.
The authority named a TikTok creator with 600,000 followers as the type who would land on its ad blacklist, according to VnExpress. The news site reported that the influencer was fined 7.5 million dong (US$300) for mocking the poor in his clips.
TikTok said it banned the user but declined Nikkei’s request for comment.
Separately, the Chinese video streaming platform said that starting on Jan 1 it had become responsible for collecting taxes for foreigners buying TikTok ads in Vietnam.
The country is also a large ad market for Meta and YouTube owner Google, which declined to comment for this article.
Activists say the proposed blacklist will have a chilling effect on free speech.
“Authorities would abuse this policy to silence critics and promote pro-government voices,” Kian Vesteinsson, senior research analyst at global nonprofit Freedom House, told Nikkei, calling the ad policy the state’s “latest effort to sharpen its control over online speech”.
The foreign ministry has said that Freedom House bases its analysis on “incorrect information and prejudices.”
The information ministry said it fined 15 companies a total of 210 million dong (US$8,600) for unspecified ad-related infractions in the past year or so.
This is not the first time authorities are targeting sponsors. Several years ago Vietnam urged digital advertisers to boycott sites that hosted “malicious” content.
The rise of foreign internet platforms offered an alternative to official news outlets in the one-party state, whose digital economy by 2025 will have Southeast Asia’s top growth rate, 31%, according to a report by Temasek, Google and Bain. Vietnam has responded to the rising popularity of social media by arresting those who used their accounts to challenge authorities.
The state also has named and shamed businesses before, such as in lists of tax debtors or illegal online casinos.
Rights advocates say companies like Facebook and Google acquiesce to too many blockage orders, while the government says the companies do not do enough to block objectionable posts.
“Cross-border advertising businesses that do not comply with Vietnamese laws will not be allowed to operate in Vietnam,” the information ministry said.