Governments caught in the Web

Vietnamese blogger Nguyen Van Hoa was sentenced in November to seven years in jail for “spreading anti-state propaganda” online. He had written about a chemical spill at a Taiwanese-owned factory in central Vietnam.

Vietnam is hardly alone among countries where online activists operate in a climate of fear. Chinese authorities have acknowledged blocking 13,000 websites in the past three years and deleting 10 million user-accounts from various Chinese-run sites, mainly from social-media platforms such as WeChat and Weibo. In that same period, more than 2,200 site administrators were warned of consequences they would face if they continued criticising or allowing criticism of the ruling Communist Party and state authorities.

Beijing has the power and determination to ban outright massive global brands like Google and Facebook, the Western sites left stranded on the wrong side of “the Great Firewall of China”, their pleas for accommodation ignored.

Meanwhile in Russia, voices of dissent are rarely heard at all, and not merely because President Vladimir Putin does enjoy a significant measure of popularity. There, the chilling effects applied to Internet suppression are complete. As well, Moscow relies heavily on spreading disinformation, employing hundreds of “trolls” full-time to fill chat rooms and comment sections with pro-government messages.

Vietnam, another communist nation, announced this past week that 10,000 cyber-warriors would be deployed to counter online dissent, further raising the global stakes in the war to control free speech. Whereas China bans social-media platforms, the government of Vietnam routinely jails its critics while closely monitoring online activity.

The 10,000-strong brigade dubbed “Force 47” has been ordered to “fight wrongful views” on the Net and, under such an authoritarian regime, “wrongful views” can mean anything arbitrarily deemed objectionable. Some observers believe Force 47 will, among other tasks, conduct smear campaigns against online activists, a serious escalation in state tactics of repression.

In Thailand, smear campaigns like this are called “information operations” and often carried out against political and social activists who are critical of the military’s operations in the far South. The Computer Crimes Act has also been used unfairly on

dissidents. But these efforts largely fail due to a lack of sophistication in the way alternative narratives are presented. The (dis)information proffered by authorities is clearly unsupported by facts, so no one is fooled, and the undertaking only makes matters worse by fostering more enemies.

Around half of Vietnam’s 93 million people have access to the Web and the country is among Facebook’s top 10 users on a per capita basis. Yet Freedom House, an Internet watchdog group, has declared Vietnam, along with China, as “not free”, because of the intimidation that users regularly face. States such as ours need to rethink their approach to curtailing undesirable information on the Internet. The current methods are steadily chipping away at their credibility, not to mention their legitimacy.

Chasing down online critics is also an unsustainable practice because so much time and so many resources are spent on the effort. Online repression has no place in good governance. Governments risk being labelled police states. And governments always have more important tasks to tackle than trying to silence dissidents. Finally, such an approach often backfires by drawing the public’s attention to issues that otherwise would have remained covert.