A series of Facebook pages in Vietnam suddenly disappeared

Many fanpages, including large ones, suddenly disappeared without a clear cause. The event caused a stir in the technology and marketing communities.

On the morning of March 18, Facebook users could not find major fanpages in Vietnam such as "Life Stories" and "Food Corner". Foody.vn's Facebook page with more than 3 million followers also disappeared for unknown reasons.

Some major fanpages in Vietnam are currently inaccessible.

This is not the first time that major Facebook pages in Vietnam have been locked. In early 2017, the pages "Nghe gi xem gi", "Welax" and Giang Popper's fanpage with more than 2.7 million likes also encountered this situation.

In 2015, the death of fanpages "Beat.vn", "Thuc luc xem bong da" or "2!Idol" also caused a stir in the online community. At the same time, online businesses in Vietnam also cried because a series of fanpages were closed by Facebook.

Facebook has not yet made any official comments on the above cases.

According to Mr. Nguyen Ba Ngoc, a media expert from NBN Media, copyright infringement (video, music...) may be the leading cause of Facebook blocking fanpages in Vietnam. Next is posting "fake news". Facebook pages selling products can also be "involved" if they post misleading images, promote incorrect content, sell counterfeit products...

The incident is causing a stir on many technology forums and marketing circles. Most opinions say that the owners of the "scanned" sites may have violated copyright when posting videos and photos without citing the source and were warned. Others think that the site owners may not strictly comply with payment when running ads.

In late 2016, Mark Zuckerberg also declared war on fake news on Facebook - which is believed to have helped Donald Trump win the election. Although denying this "conspiracy theory", the Facebook CEO has also taken certain actions to limit fake news on Facebook, such as blocking links to pages that specialize in posting fake news, permanently banning accounts that specialize in spreading false rumors. However, Facebook has not announced a mechanism for this social network to help this social network evaluate the reliability of a post.

In a related development, the Ministry of Information and Communications has just issued Circular 38, detailing the provision of public information across borders. Accordingly, sites such as Facebook and YouTube are obliged to cooperate in preventing bad and toxic information, and handling false, distorted, and fabricated information that has a negative impact on society on the Internet.

In March 2017, a number of YouTube channels posting inappropriate content were removed by Google and restricted from being displayed in Vietnam. Several large businesses such as Vietnam Airlines, Samsung, and Yamaha also stopped advertising on YouTube after discovering that they were displayed on videos that were not in accordance with Vietnamese law.

According to Zing