Freedom on the Net 2021: Vietnam remains “Not Free” on internet freedom

On September 21, 2021, Freedom House, a Washington D.C.-based organization, released its annual report Freedom on the Net 2021. In the report, Vietnam scored 22 on a 100-point scale, being classified as “not free” based on Freedom House’s measuring scale.

Vietnam’s score this year is 2 points lower than its rating for 24 in 2019 but is equal to its 2020 score, which was also 22.

According to Freedom House, three key factors that affect Vietnam’s overall score include the Vietnamese government’s growing pressure on Facebook to restrict and censor content deemed as “sensitive” or “critical” to the state; the government’s censorship, arrests and smear campaigns of several independent candidates during the country’s National Assembly elections; and the draft decree regarding personal data protection that require online platforms to collect and store the personal data of Vietnamese users for providing to the government upon request.

In a response to journalists’ queries regarding the results, the Vietnamese Foreign Ministry’s spokeswoman Le Thi Thu Hang said that Freedom House’s report “has no value” since it is a “biased and prejudiced assessment based on untrue information on Vietnam,” reports state-run VietnamPlus. Hanoi has consistently denied the country’s serious violations of basic human rights, while political prisoners are commonly viewed as bargaining chips by the government on the international negotiation table.

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