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Facebook navigates an internet fractured by government controls

Facebook said its policies in Vietnam have not changed, and it has a consistent process for governments to report illegal content

Facebook navigates an internet fractured by government controls
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Paul MozurMark scottMike Isaac
On a muggy, late spring evening, Tuan Pham awoke to the police storming his house in Hanoi, Vietnam.

They marched him to a police station and made their demand: Hand over your Facebook password. Tuan, a computer engineer, had recently written a poem on the social network called “Mother’s Lullaby,” which criticised how the communist country was run.

One line read, “One century has passed, we are still poor and hungry, do you ask why?”

Tuan’s arrest came just weeks after Facebook offered a major olive branch to Vietnam’s government. Facebook’s head of global policy management, Monika Bickert, met with a top Vietnamese