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Vietnamese authorities are instituting (or escalating) an online crackdown on free expression; they’re not starting a consumer safety revolution. It’s no coincidence that Vietnam ranks 175th out of 180 countries on Reporters Without Borders’s 2018 World Press Freedom Index. Let’s hope that the United States politicians remember how easily such hollow “protection” justifications come, though, when making their own Internet regulations.

In Vietnam, dissident artist and former pop star Do Nguyen Mai Khoi is one of those brave enough to come out against her country’s new cyberlaw. “We are losing the only space where we can express ourselves freely,” she has said. She knows what she’s talking about, having used Facebook to campaign when she ran as an independent for Vietnam’s national assembly. There would have been few other safe ways for her to get out the word.

In the West, the focus now is on what some regulation advocates term the “weaponization of data”: basically, Facebook carelessly throwing around its users’ personal information and allowing foreign entities to manipulate U.S. elections. And Facebook facilitating the spread of fake news and dangerous hate. There’s a real basis for the concern; yet there’s also evidence of how easily such concern can slide into calls for censorship of the same flavour as the cyber law being implemented in Vietnam, even if the intent is a great deal more benign. A recent U.K. bill made it a crime to look at terrorist-related information online more than twice. The motive of protection is obvious, yet what is and isn’t terrorist-related is far from clear cut (and may not be something we should be comfortable to have decided by whoever happens to be in power), and what of accessing such materials for research or even simply to understand the current situation of the world?

Censorship is dangerous, even when it’s not a one-party government putting it in place.

For the sake of the future of free speech in the West, we should pay attention to the steady erosion of free speech in Vietnam and be as chilled by it as we would by similar measures taken here. Because that may happen sooner than we think.

National Post

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