“On a muggy, late spring evening, Tuan Pham awoke to the police storming his house in Hanoi, Vietnam.They marched him to a police station and made their demand: Hand over your Facebook password. Mr. Tuan, a computer engineer, had recently written a poem on the social network called “Mother’s Lullaby,” which criticized how the communist country was run.
One line read, “One century has passed, we are still poor and hungry, do you ask why?”Mr. Tuan’s arrest came just weeks after Facebook offered a major olive branch to Vietnam’s government. Facebook’s head of global policy management, Monika Bickert, met with a top Vietnamese official in April and pledged to remove information from the social network that violated the country’s laws.
While Facebook said its policies in Vietnam have not changed, and it has a consistent process for governments to report illegal content, the Vietnamese government was specific. The social network, they have said, had agreed to help create a new communications channel with the government to prioritize Hanoi’s requests and remove what the regime considered inaccurate posts about senior leaders.”
David Lindsay
Hamden, CT
Very interesting article: thank you. I have questions. If we start to use messaging on Facebook, or Messenger, is there any known abuse of customers by Facebook’s collecting of our marketing preference, to target ads, outside of their accepting fake news ads and posts, and allowing the targeting of political groups, or demographic groups, with fake news and politically sensitive lies. What is Facebook doing about these Fake News issues, and how Facebook was used by the Russians and perhaps some Republicans, to corrupt the last presidential election? What could Federal regulators do, that they aren’t doing yet?
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