6 major violations of Tiktok in Vietnam caused many consequences

With the violations currently causing many serious consequences, the Ministry of Information and Communications will organize an interdisciplinary inspection team with the participation of relevant ministries and branches to comprehensively inspect TikTok's operations in Vietnam in May 2023...

Tiktok Vietnam has many violations

This information was shared by Director of the Department of Radio, Television and Electronic Information Le Quang Tu Do at the regular press conference of the Ministry of Information and Communications held on the afternoon of April 6, 2023.

Since 2019, TikTok has grown very strongly in the Vietnamese market. However, strong development does not go hand in hand with responsibility to maintain and manage a healthy and safe platform for users. Previously, TikTok was mainly purely for entertainment, but since 2022, many anti-party and anti-state content, illegal content, harmful content, and content affecting children have grown strongly, creating a trend.

6 VIOLATIONS OF TIKTOK IN VIETNAM

According to Deputy Minister of Information and Communications Nguyen Thanh Lam, one of the state management areas of the Ministry of Information and Communications is to manage information on social networks, fight against bad and toxic information, violations of the law, and wrong views spread on social networks. Specifically, it is to review and evaluate violations by individual social network participants, actors participating in the ecosystem, of which the most important are cross-border social network platforms.

Regarding TikTok's violations in Vietnam, a representative of the Department of Radio, Television and Electronic Information stated that, firstly, TikTok does not have effective measures to control content related to politics , anti-Party and anti-State content; fake news; nonsense, toxic content, and even dangerous content for children.

Deputy Minister of Information and Communications Nguyen Thanh Lam speaks at a regular press conference

The second is to use automatic content distribution algorithms to create trends to spread sensational, clickbait content, regardless of whether it is toxic, offensive, or has a negative impact on the community and young people.

Third, there are no effective control measures to prevent the trading, advertising and promotion of counterfeit goods.

Fourth, there is no management of TikTok idols' activities. Many TikTok idols tend to produce nonsense and uncultured content to target viewers' curiosity, and even create trends to profit from this content.

Fifth, there is no effective control over pirated content, especially content extracted from movies.

And sixthly, Tiktok also has no management measures to prevent users from arbitrarily using other people's private and personal images to spread fake news, or defame and insult others.

These violations by TikTok have caused many consequences, affecting users. According to Mr. Do, TikTok's violations have left serious consequences such as creating a favorable environment for fake news to spread, causing economic damage and social instability. Encouraging young people to imitate and follow bad and offensive trends, distorting the perception and lifestyle of young people, and corrupting the cultural values of the nation.

The platform's lax regulation has encouraged and facilitated illegal business activities; pirated content is rampant.

In fact, the current violation situation is not only on Tiktok but also on other social networking platforms with variations with similar features on Facebook Reels and YouTube Shorts. Short-form videos like TikTok are popular and easier to trend than long-form videos and text, images...

WILL COMPREHENSIVELY INSPECT TIKTOK'S OPERATIONS IN VIETNAM

Regarding Tiktok's violations, Mr. Do said that there are currently specific legal regulations on this issue such as the Law on Information Technology, the Law on Advertising, the Law on Cyber Security, Decrees 72/2013/ND-CP and Decree 70/2021/ND-CP. In which, businesses providing cross-border services are required to be responsible for preventing and removing infringing content and information at the request of competent authorities.

In case these organizations and individuals do not comply, the competent authority will deploy technical measures to block all content, services, and applications on the network that violate the law.

Mr. Le Quang Tu Do: The Ministry will organize an interdisciplinary inspection team with the participation of relevant ministries and branches such as: Industry and Trade, Culture, Sports and Tourism, Police, General Department of Taxation... to comprehensively inspect TikTok's operations in Vietnam.

Also in the past time, the authorities have coordinated with relevant ministries and branches to organize many meetings and issue documents resolutely requesting TikTok and other cross-border platforms such as Facebook and Youtube to proactively prevent and remove violating information.

In addition, developing tools and techniques to scan, detect and handle information violations. However, social networking platforms using algorithms such as TikTok are "dodging" the toolkit so that it cannot automatically scan and detect violations, making it difficult to handle violations on TikTok.

With the huge amount of information generated every day on social media platforms like TikTok today, if these units do not proactively cooperate and filter thoroughly with algorithms, blocking and removing violating content will be less effective. Violations still exist on many cross-border platforms.

To continue to prevent this situation, the Ministry will synchronously deploy legal, economic, technical, diplomatic, communication solutions, etc. to require cross-border platforms to comply with Vietnamese law. Specifically, regarding economic measures, Decree 71 of the Government clearly states that platforms that violate the law announced by the Ministry of Information and Communications will not be advertised by brands and advertising agencies. In addition, payment intermediaries are not allowed to cooperate or support payments on violating platforms... Technically, it may be possible to block operations, domain names, servers, etc.

Emphasizing further on the method of combating cross-border platforms, the Deputy Minister of Information and Communications said that, along with using many of the above measures, the Ministry also applies a plan to block the flow of money, regulate the flow of advertising money on cyberspace so that it does not flow to bad and toxic content...

In particular, for the TikTok platform, the Ministry will organize an interdisciplinary inspection team with the participation of relevant ministries and branches such as: Industry and Trade, Culture, Sports and Tourism, Police, General Department of Taxation... to comprehensively inspect TikTok's operations in Vietnam.

After the inspection, the Ministry will also coordinate with relevant ministries and branches to comprehensively assess the impact and influence of TikTok on the community, as well as the law enforcement of this social network. From there, it will advise superiors on more fundamental and thorough handling, not just stopping at fighting to remove bad, toxic content that violates the law, Mr. Do said.

Along with that, the effectiveness of the scanning tool including images and videos will be enhanced. Coordinate with the Ministry of Industry and Trade to manage the e-commerce service provision of TikTok Shop as well as other cross-border platforms in Vietnam...

Vneconomy