Blogging three ways in Vietnam's political blogosphere.

• Author: Duong, Mai

This article discusses the dynamism of Vietnam's social media landscape by identifying three kinds of blogging and the different political views espoused by Vietnamese bloggers. This classification is based on a thematic analysis of blog postings, media discussions and semi-structured interviews conducted in 2013-15. The author's mapping of Vietnam's blogosphere demonstrates four features: first, the growth of political blogs; second, how the blogosphere has become an arena for competing political ideologies; third, the utilization of blogs by various factions within the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) to serve their own interests; and fourth, blogs as an important source of independent news and information. Understanding political blogs in Vietnam today helps us understand how Vietnamese bloggers maximize online freedom of speech, the zigzagging attitude of the CPV in managing the Internet in an attempt to reinforce its legitimacy and the challenges blogs pose to the state-run media's monopoly in the digital age.

Keywords: Vietnamese bloggers, political blogs, online freedom, propaganda press.

In global rankings on Internet freedom, international watchdogs consistently rate Vietnam very low (1) due to the fact that the government has increased its control of the Internet using various monitoring methods and because it detains journalists, bloggers and netizens for espousing their political views. (2) However, these surveys do not capture the complexity of the ongoing changes in Vietnam brought about by the Internet. Vietnam's cyber environment has experienced remarkable changes since the late 2000s when the effects of the Internet started to reach beyond the economic sector and began to influence public discourse and civil society as a whole. After a decade--from 1997 to 2007--of being delayed due to the political and economic calculations of the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV), (3) the government relaxed its monopoly over, and management of, the Internet as a tool of economic development. (4)

The spread of the Internet in Vietnam since 2007 has brought a new dimension to the everyday lives of the Vietnamese people other than its use in pursuit of economic goals and opportunities. Internet usage is not only measured by the mushrooming number of users, but also by the range of online activities. Together with the growing online community --which numbered nearly 50 million by July 2016 (5)--Internet usage has expanded from providing access to "Western entertainment" to being "a forum for free, fair and unrestricted public debates". (6) The Internet has also helped bring about "freedom of connection" (7) and facilitated freedom of expression via many different forms of social media as more users than ever can express their opinions concerning important national issues.

The CPV understands that the Internet plays a key role in national economic development, but remains suspicious of its power, particularly the rise of social media and its ability to attract and mobilize people, especially young people. The "soft" blocking rule which is applied to Facebook, the largest social network platform in Vietnam, is a typical example of the CPV's carrot-and-stick management policy. (8) On the one hand, Vietnamese leaders have publicly praised Facebook as "an essential and unprohibited need" that offers "sharper communication tools than conventional methods". (9) On the other hand, to manage Facebook content, the Party employs tactics such as limiting Facebook usage by state-run agencies and companies, hacking and making false claims of spam anonymously on activists' pages.

Government regulations, such as Decree No. 97 (10) and Decree No. 72 (11) are used to surveil the online community. Any blog or website that contains comments critical of CPV policies are labelled by the authorities as "toxic" websites created by "evil forces". (12) The Committee to Protect Journalists reports that six Vietnamese bloggers served custodial sentences in 2015. (13) In cyberspace's heavily censored environment, Vietnamese bloggers have been tirelessly trying to attract more readers, challenging the mainstream media and debating the changing dynamics of Vietnamese politics.

This article discusses the dynamism of Vietnam's social media landscape by identifying three groups of bloggers and the different political views they espouse. The author's classification of blogs is the latest mapping of Vietnam's burgeoning political blogosphere. Understanding the country's blogosphere today helps illuminate the efforts of Vietnamese bloggers to push the boundaries of online freedom of speech, the zigzagging attitude of the CPV in managing the Internet in an attempt to reinforce its legitimacy and the challenges that the Internet poses to the state's monopoly of the media in the digital age.

The Rising Influence of Vietnamese Bloggers

Blogs are perceived to offer a "cross-section of media, politics and discourse". (14) In the United States, scholars have demonstrated the power of blogs to shape political tactics and strategies, affect legal outcomes and even influence foreign and domestic policies. (15) Outside the United States, Internet users have used blogs to campaign for democracy, exert political pressure on the authorities and express alternative political viewpoints. (16) The blogs studied in this article are political blogs written by bloggers in Vietnam which target Vietnamese readers. In explaining the rapid rise of blogs, Stephen Coleman, one of the UK's leading scholars of political communication argues that some people "prefer to trust their own judgement" rather than depend on the "usual sources" such as the mainstream media. (17)

The history of Vietnamese blogging is generally thought to have started in 2006, when the word "blog" became common currency among young Vietnamese. (18) With three million Yahoo! 360[degrees] blogs (19) recorded in 2007, the growth of the Vietnamese blogosphere has been described as a "social phenomenon" or "a new sort of freedom". (20) The first blogs were mainly used to facilitate communication among friends and discuss uncontroversial social issues such as fashion and celebrities--the number of blogs devoted to politics and sensitive issues was relatively small. (21) This was also the time when bloggers in Vietnam began witnessing moves by the CPV to intensify its censorship of Internet activities through the enforcement of legal regulations, application of firewalls, distribution of malware and the harassment and detention of political bloggers. (22) The collapse of Yahoo! 360[degrees] in 2009 marked a setback for blogging in Vietnam, as the number of Internet users who read blogs fell from 46 per cent to less than 40 per cent. (23)

The declining readership of Vietnamese blogs continued after 2009, with the rate of blog writing among Internet users falling from 16 per cent in 2009 to 11 per cent in 2011. (24) This drop can be attributed to the rising popularity of other social networks, such as Facebook, Zing Me or Google Plus which offered Internet users more choices than blog posts. Blog traffic declined, but the influence of social media began to rise as "alternative viewpoints" (25) to the state media, and became a "powerful tool" (26) for ordinary citizens to promote political discussion. The arrival of Facebook in 2009 created an important shortcut between blog readers and blog writers; political blogs became linked to Vietnam's Facebook community which multiplied about twenty-two times over five years--from 1.4 million users in 2011 to 31.3 million in 2015. (27)

The rapidly increasing influence of the Internet on social life in Vietnam became apparent in 2001 when the government relaxed its management of the Internet by granting more licenses to Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and producing more Internet Exchange Points (IXPs). (28) This was also the time when Vietnamese political blogs diverged into different groups. Nina E.N. Vennevold was the first researcher to categorize Vietnamese bloggers into two groups: those who blogged about topics well within the boundaries set by the government; and those who challenged those boundaries. However, while Vennevold observed the "political space" (29) created by Vietnamese bloggers, she did not believe that the blogosphere would have a major impact on the wider community because bloggers had a "deeply rooted culture of fear" and self-censored on matters concerning "sensitive content". (30)

Other researchers have concluded that since 2012, the rise of social media and social networks in Vietnam has led to the opening of an "active online public sphere" (31) and that blogs and Facebook have become influential enough "to provide alternative viewpoints from state-controlled official media outlets". (32) Together with the expanding online community, Vietnam's blogs and social media are viewed as spaces for promoting petitions, (33) social movements, (34) the country's growing civil society (35) and a "political arena" for netizens to express their views on current social issues. (36)

This article contributes to the discussion on the dynamism of Vietnam's social media by identifying three categories of blogs based on their political motivations and viewpoints. The author applies the concept of online freedom of expression of the Internet as discussed by Dutton et al. (37) to discuss what is behind the three types of blogging in Vietnam's political blogosphere. Since freedom of expression is a basic human right, Dutton et al. highlights the role of the Internet in adding more dimensions to this freedom, it being "a primary interface between individuals and the world" and a source of news and information for individuals and groups. (38) Given the unprecedented freedom that the Internet has created, individuals can voice their ideas on political issues on a more regular and unfettered basis. Even as more governments are applying methods to block...