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Facebook agreed to censor posts after Vietnam slowed traffic – sources
- leephillips 6y agoI'm a little surprised that people are still surprised about this kind of thing. Various countries, groups, and, probably, individuals have a big say in what you see returned as search results on Google, what's available on YouTube, and more. Until, possibly, very recently, Pakistan had veto power over what Google was allowed to show on YouTube—and not just in Pakistan. https://www.wired.com/2016/01/youtube-returns-to-pakistan-after-three-year-ban/ https://www.wired.com/2016/01/youtube-returns-to-pakistan-af...
- koheripbal 6y agoI'm surprised you think people are surprised. Where are people expressing surprise that this sort of activity is going on?
- leephillips 6y agoI’m surprised that you’re surprised that I’m surprised that people are still surprised about this kind of thing. Right below your comment (this answers your question “Where...”) is a comment that begins, “Kind of surprising.”
- zoobab 6y agoFaceboook and the Holocaust.
- gigatexal 6y agoI'm not surprised. They're a publicly traded company with a fiduciary to operate in the shareholder's best interest not be some moral beacon of truth.
- stuff4ben 6y agoI hate that HN allows downvotes for disagreement rather than off-topic or non-sensical commenting. You make a good point. I'm reminded of the movie Avatar, "there’s one thing that shareholders hate more than bad press, and that’s a bad quarterly statement."
- scrollbar 6y agoI'd imagine the downvotes are because it's a factually inaccurate statement (as I understand it). Duty to maximize profits is a myth, which I think I first heard about here on HN! https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-corporations-obligations-to-shareholders/corporations-dont-have-to-maximize-profits https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co...
- gigatexal 6y agoOh dang I stand corrected. My statement could remove the fiduciary part and replace it with human nature and remain correct I think. It’s a basis of economics that the firm seeks to maximize profits where feasible.
- zentiggr 6y agoSo shareholders are the problem. Let's abolish them and see what else interferes with good ethical choices and fix that and keep going. That's how things get better.
- stuff4ben 6y agoThat's infeasible in our economy. Generation of wealth is something that is needed and beneficial to society. Abolishing shareholders is not the answer. Having better politicians (i.e. not corrupt) to reign in capitalist markets to enforce moral behavior would be a better choice.
- zentiggr 6y ago
- mcphage 6y agoWell, Facebook just taught every country in the world how they can be controlled to take down content that country doesn’t like.
- ipsum2 6y agoFacebook is obligated to follow the laws of the countries its in, or are you saying that country laws don't matter?
- ectospheno 6y agoLegal isn’t a subset of good. Illegal isn’t a subset of bad. You can be legal and morally bankrupt at the same time. Facebook could be ethical and have half a billion less dollars or do what they did. Interesting choice that I’m sure isn’t on a slippery slope at all.
- mcphage 6y agoThey didn't do it to follow Vietnam's laws, they did it because Vietnam was throttling their site.
- NhanH 6y agoJust tangentially related to the topic at hand, but I have a question to ask HN. The main trans-Pacific cable connection between Vietnam and the US tends to be damaged several times a year (3<n<10 is my guess), which severely slow downs any connection to the outside of Vietnam during the time it is under maintenance. This always happens suspiciously during major political holiday (Independence day and the likes), so Vietnamese has just assumed that is a blatant censorship attempt. The wiki page has an outage section you can read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asia-America_Gateway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asia-America_Gateway , it doesn't list anything beyond 2018, but the situation is the same. So my question is, how likely it is that the cable system are just really shitty? Or is the assumption of bald-faced censorship correct?
- callamdelaney 6y agoThe main issue iirc is that people keep stealing their undersea cabling [1] meaning that their speeds are often significantly reduced. [1] http://texyt.com/vietnam+internet+cable+stolen+by+thieves+00096 http://texyt.com/vietnam+internet+cable+stolen+by+thieves+00...
- netsharc 6y agoWhich country's independence day/holidays? Imagine if your job is to drive the tractor on the beach that would "chop" the cable up once or twice every year...
- NhanH 6y agoVietnam has an Independence day, and a National Day, which are the two holidays that always get the outages.
- lonelappde 6y agoWhat better way to celebrate independence than to cut the cord to the rest of the world!
- phonon 6y ago"State media at the time blamed the slowdown on maintenance to undersea cables, and state telecoms firms apologized for unstable access to Facebook."
- blago 6y agoWell, that explains it. I've been using FB on VPN for more than a month until last week. At the time I thought that the outages were due to increased traffic - perhaps they were routing locally and hadn't provisioned enough resources. I wish they didn't buckle.
- keithnoizu 6y agoInternet has been all around wonky in the region lately. I'm in Cambodia but opennet routes through vietnam. Things like S3 buckets getting bps download speeds on the regular connection and jumping to mbps on vpn. Hours versus seconds of download time.
- piokoch 6y agoKind of surprising. I can somehow understand that FB bends under pressure from Chinese government - huge population of a "superpower" country. But Vietnam? It looks as if FB was forced to squeeze every cent of their revenue. FB might have just opened Pandora's box with all kind of restriction requests coming from all over the World.
- matheusmoreira 6y agoWhy wouldn't it? The alternative is to cease operations in that country and lose access to all of its citizens.
- blago 6y agoVietnam has a fairly large population and FB is the platform of choice for communication and to a large degree shopping. Small businesses love it. For anecdotal evidence, I have been ordering food on FB every day for the last month. My wife is watching a life-streaming apparel sale as we speak.
- JCharante 6y agoFacebook is truly huge. Several expats I know that had previously quit Facebook have had to unquit because it's so ingrained in society. Checking menus and hours (Facebook pages will be more up to date than google maps entries), messaging to order delivery, live streams for online shopping, finding an apartment, buying motorbikes... Relating to your small businesses, a lot of them will have their own shippers to save on having to pay the cut from a food delivery app. When I needed a reusable mask after the ones I had were running out at the end of my quarantine, I just messaged a guy who had his online business and an hour later my shipment had arrived (he used an inter-city courier, but you get the point). Somehow being in a city of 8 million makes you feel in more of a community than being in a city of 150k. I've had a bakery message me to ask if I was in the mood for ordering cupcakes when they still had extra at the end of the day (and I was). A few weeks after a new japanese ramen restaurant told me they only offered take out, they messaged me to tell me that they now offered delivery. It's an amazing channel for businesses to reach their customers. It's also a really convenient place to get news, because since all news sources are government approved then there's no fake news to worry about. (and by fake news I mean sensationalist stuff, not anything serious relating to politics. I obviously understand the shortcomings with such a system when it relates to criticism of the government) It's also really nice because you don't have pseudo-science crap on your feed (since sharing that stuff is a fineable offense). Although you still have to watch out for the moms in their Zalo groupchats.
- CaptArmchair 6y agoVietnam is a complex country. Wikipedia gives more background: > Vietnam is a unitary Marxist-Leninist one-party socialist republic, one of the two communist states (the other being Laos) in Southeast Asia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam#Government_and_politics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam#Government_and_politic... Politically, it's still an autocratic state, but economically the country has opened up to the global market since the 1980's, not unlike China. > Human rights have long been a matter of much controversy between the Government of Vietnam and some international human rights organizations and Western governments, particularly that of the United States. Under the current constitution, the Communist Party of Vietnam is the only one allowed to rule, the operation of all other political parties being outlawed. Other human rights issues concern freedom of association, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Vietnam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Vietnam Vietnam is home to several ethnic minorities and a range of religions and beliefs. There haven been frequent regional tensions and uprisings over the past decades and Vietnam itself has also had disputes over borders with Cambodia and China right after the end of the Vietnam War. Vietnam and Facebook have a rocky past, but Facebook is well embedded in Vietnamese society by now. For instance, it is a bedrock for small business owners as it allows them to escape restrictions which are enforced on street shops. So, it's a source of wealth, but at the same time, it irks authorities enough to create tensions. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-07/vietnam-relies-on-once-banned-facebook-to-kick-start-businesses https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-07/vietnam-r...
- zentiggr 6y agoSo if Facebook pulls out of Vietnam, their economy is likely to suffer because of their own internal politics. Sounds like another excellent reason to leave the country and refuse to support the regime until actual democracy is in place. (Of course, you could say that argues that companies should leave the US now as well, but that's another can of worms.) Facebook doesn't have any requirement to be embedded in society, anywhere. And regardless of its spot benefits anywhere, it is still an overall negative influence.
- CaptArmchair 6y ago
- lonelappde 6y agoIt's easy to be mad at Facebook, but more productive to build an promote alternative to give people better choices.
- 908087 6y agoWhy not both?
- preoccupied1985 6y agoAttention is a scarce resource