This article was originally published by Radio Free Asia and is reprinted with permission.
Three Facebook users in Ho Chi Minh City were fined or warned by police not to disseminate “untrue news” about recently deceased Vietnam Communist Party chief Nguyen Phu Trong, Vietnamese state media reported Monday.
Trong died on July 19 at the age of 80, after serving for 13 years as the most powerful leader in the Southeast Asian country’s one-party political system.
The Cyber Security and High-Tech Crime Prevention Bureau under the Ho Chi Minh City Police Department summoned the three for questioning and fined one of them VND7.5 million, or US$300, state media said. Another was fined 5 million dong, or US$200, while the third one received a warning not to recommit the act.
The Facebookers, all born in the mid-1980s and only identified by their initials, were accused of using the social media platform for “providing, sharing fake information, distorting, defaming, libeling organizations, individuals to humiliate them” in accordance with Article 101 of a government decree issued in February 2020.
The 2020 regulation known as Decree 15 allows for administrative fines of up to 100 million Vietnamese dong, or US$4,000, for anyone who stores or spreads information deemed to be false, distorting and fictitious. The fines can be imposed for offenses not serious enough to merit criminal prosecution.
The decree is one of several regulations through which the government dominated by the ruling Communist Party of Vietnam exercises a high degree of control over content published online to manipulate public opinion on social media platforms and websites.
In the days after Trong’s death, the Ho Chi Minh police’s cyber security unit detected Vietnamese and foreign nationals using social media to post information deemed to be “unfounded” and intended “to destroy the national unity [and] to humiliate the party and state leaders’ dignity.”
