
Facebook agreed to censor posts after Vietnam slowed traffic – sources - Longprao
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-vietnam-facebook-exclusive/exclusive-facebook-agreed-to-censor-posts-after-vietnam-slowed-traffic-sources-idUSKCN2232JX
======
NhanH
Just 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?

~~~
londons_explore
Undersea cable _is_ pretty unreliable. Most major cables expect to break every
few years.

Usually breaks are caused by humans (ships pulling anchors, sabotage/spying).
Sometimes they're natural (caused by wildlife, ocean floor movement, flaws in
the cable design).

Fixes usually take a few hours if they happen at the endpoints, or weeks if
they happen somewhere under the ocean.

Interestingly, spying breaks always involve _three_ simultaneous breaks in the
cable. The cable is broken at two points, and then broken at a third point in
the middle to put spy equipment. They do this so the people operating the
cable can't tell where the spy equipment was inserted, since otherwise you can
tell where a cable is broken or being tampered with by sending light down the
cable and seeing how long before light reflects off the broken bit and comes
back to the end.

Using statistical methods, you can see how frequently you'd expect a cable to
break at different points along it's length simultaneously, and it happens a
lot more than raw chance would suggest.

~~~
rhacker
What's the point of spying on traffic you can't read?

~~~
ashtonkem
Metadata is incredibly useful in its own right, and spy agencies regularly
record huge amounts of data in the hope that they can decrypt it in the
future.

~~~
goatinaboat
Even if you can’t read a single packet, noting a surge in bandwidth
utilisation is a signal in and of itself. But you probably can read the
headers.

------
piokoch
Kind 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.

~~~
lonelappde
Facebook obeys the law everywhere it is enforced. Some laws are better than
than others.

Facebook makes essentially 0 profit in poor countries like Vietnam. Their
presence there is a more general wanting to be everywhereand have everyone on
board to support their users and advertisers in wealthy nations.

~~~
yesplorer
Did you read the article?

Vietnam's digital ad market was worth some $550 million in 2018 and 70% of
that went to Facebook and Google.

~~~
Grimm1
The global digital advertising market is some 240BN and expected to grow to
like 500BN by 2024, 550M is an incredibly tiny portion of their overall
earnings from digital advertisements. Google's share of that 550M, for
instance, would be less than 1% of its revenue from digital ads in 2019.
That's not a lot of money for either of those companies.

~~~
BubRoss
200 million per year is a lot of money for anyone. Also if the global ad
market doubles, wouldn't facebook capture a lot of that? Also how much more is
vietnam growing than other countries?

------
leephillips
I'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-
af...](https://www.wired.com/2016/01/youtube-returns-to-pakistan-after-three-
year-ban/)

~~~
koheripbal
I'm surprised you think people are surprised. Where are people expressing
surprise that this sort of activity is going on?

~~~
leephillips
I’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.”

------
blago
Well, 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
Internet 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.

------
lonelappde
It's easy to be mad at Facebook, but more productive to build an promote
alternative to give people better choices.

~~~
908087
Why not both?

~~~
preoccupied1985
Attention is a scarce resource

------
gigatexal
I'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.

~~~
MiroF
This hurts their engineer recruitment in the US - which isn't in the
shareholders best interest.

~~~
stuff4ben
I doubt most shareholders care about that at all. Feeling good vs making
money?

~~~
MiroF
> I doubt most shareholders care about that at all. Feeling good vs making
> money?

You don't see a connection between Facebook's recruitment of engineering
talent and Facebook making money? It's almost as if you didn't read my
comment.

~~~
stuff4ben
I read your comment and I disagree. That's a tenuous connection between
shareholders caring that a subset of potential FB engineers will not want to
work there on moral grounds.

~~~
MiroF
Likewise, there are probably few shareholders who have spent much time
actively considering FBs role in Vietnam. Like it or not, FB has to deal with
a tight labor market, and things harming their image mean that they have to
pay more for the same level of talent. Tech companies are extremely aware of
this dynamic, even if their shareholders are less so.

------
CaptArmchair
Vietnam 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_politic...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam#Government_and_politics)

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-r...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-07/vietnam-
relies-on-once-banned-facebook-to-kick-start-businesses)

~~~
zentiggr
So 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
Good points!

If Facebook pulls out, the general population - not the economic or political
elites - will suffer for it.

A political regime based on a framework of democratic values, beliefs and
morals can only emerge if there's infrastructure to spread the idea: press,
education, common causes and interests and so on are needed before change
happens.

Facebook is just one element in that change. There's the narrative that
Facebook enabled the Arab Spring uprisings. It did so because it filled the
vacuum where free and independent press would exist.

You're right, Facebook doesn't have any requirement to be embedded in society.
It's a private company. And one that claims to be anything but a content
publisher (to avoid all kinds of pesky litigation). However, everyone has
embraced and incorporated Facebook into the fabric of society due to it's ease
of use. And so Facebook very much has a moral responsibility similar to that
of any newspaper company.

After all, newspapers ranging from NYT to WaPo to the Globe aren't inherently
required to publish (inter)nationally. They were originally local newspapers.

The big issue with Facebook is that it has acknowledged that it is as an
advertising business, while people clearly want to use it as a publishing
platform to spread ideas. There's a massive amount of dissonance to the
detriment of everyone, including Facebook which gets a bad rep for it's
actions.

------
mcphage
Well, Facebook just taught every country in the world how they can be
controlled to take down content that country doesn’t like.

~~~
ipsum2
Facebook is obligated to follow the laws of the countries its in, or are you
saying that country laws don't matter?

~~~
ectospheno
Legal 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.

