Censorship in Vietnam: State Media Under Unprecedented Attack

Press Plan 2025

The landscape of Vietnamese press organizations has been hit with an avalanche of restriction, censorship, and absolutist sentiment. The implementation of 2016’s Press Plan 2025 was foundational to this upheaval in the way press in Vietnam works, intentionally centralizing state media by establishing a quota system to keep independent journalism numbers down and monopolize party-state entities. The Vietnamese government has consolidated all forms of state media into six party-related media conglomerates: mouthpiece, police, army, national news, TV, and radio. There are three categories of measurable Vietnamese media: state, foreign, and independent. Local government is not recognized as a “press-governing agency”. They need to either A) find a new agency or B) limit coverage.

Along with the unification of the media voice, other provisions of Press Plan 2025 intentionally prohibit potential publishing avenues for non-state press organizations, such as:

1. Difficulties for domestic reporters in achieving domestic press licenses.
2. The weight of supervision and the (both expressed and assumed) surveillance state on journalistic and publishing autonomy.
3. The stagnation of foreign media licensing and potential alternate coverage points.
4. Any independent media releases require state approval, which is nearly impossible to get from an organization recognized as “legitimate”.  Without a press card, there is no access and no association forming.

Thus, Press Plan 2025 effectively put an end to alternative journalistic and press voices in Vietnamese media, embedding licensing clauses, dissolving independent organizations, or forcing them to other means of publication (such as magazines), and contributing to a general uneasiness and self-censorship practices across all press. To be recognized as state media, organizations have to register domestically, but the number of restrictions, caveats, tariffs, and rules imposed, even if a firm was able to get in the door, complicates the information flow further.

Causes

Commercialization and economic incentives are some of the reasons the Vietnamese government has chosen to par down/build up its government-affiliated media. Tech-firm-funded news was the most widely consumed media in Vietnam in the 2000s. Even though journalists were harassed and encouraged to stop reporting, there was less policy that could enforce silence and prevent coverage from oscillating. Economic incentives, such as press-firm-created advertising networks and higher rates of foreign involvement, fostered media growth and alternative discussions, along with a generally more tolerant view of the private press. Large newspapers had financial independence, which provided leverage against the few yet booming voices of state media. Now, Press Plan 2025 notes that the “privatization of press is subject to punishment”.

The Digital Environment

Internet and social media access were formerly pathways to alternate news means. However, digital developments have shifted to surveillance. Technology is used to monitor newsrooms and archive released coverage instead of potentially amplifying voices outside of the main conglomerates as it did a decade ago. The digital sphere had the potential to change the media landscape for good, but the Vietnamese 2018 Cybersecurity Law permitted the government to enforce total compliance with data localization laws (for both domestic and foreign entities) for all companies operating in the country. Some large technology companies, such as Meta, adhere to them and can still operate within the region with the caveat of not having the platform’s data exclusively in the cloud. Digital media is now more of a tool to maintain rather than to challenge. Artificial intelligence is already used as a means of tracking frequent headlines and who is releasing them, and as Press Plan 2025 is quota-based, this could be a problem for any sort of journalists operating in the data-localized country. 

Effects

Those legally allowed to operate journalistically have ended up self-censoring due to all of the fear surrounding the new legislation. Because of the emphasis on uniformity, there is a collective congruence of opinion, or even silence, surrounding “sensitive” events, which is not a measurable category of news. News is not predictable: it happens constantly, pushing reporters to develop their own compass for what may be considered risky to report. They are motivated to “abstain from transparency”.

This sense of censorship is an effective control measure as well, and this infinite feedback loop of silence is what drove 54% of press organizations to lose their licenses, with 60% of them “reclassifying to magazines” and another 30% becoming other publications’ supplements. Magazine licenses need to adhere to their outlined “guiding principles and purposes” (as dictated by Press Plan 2025). For example, Zing (rebranded as ZNews) received a 3-month suspension due to not adhering to magazine licenses after they lost their press license. The government figured this out through text mining and digital monitoring. Following the arrests of the organization founders, multiple media organizations have ceased publishing entirely.

Oversight

Even if a company is permitted to function within its outlined scope, many must reallocate financial and personal resources to compliance instead of coverage to ensure operational success. Journalism is both expensive and risky, as Vietnam is ranked in the top 3 nations in the world for jailers of journalists (typically those who they deem “anti-state”). The cost-effectiveness analysis of publishing became even more unbalanced when press companies had to consolidate or enter the market as a division of another entity: many employees were laid off when the ownership changed hands, and money was lost when coverage was forced to change. Following COVID, there was a massive prioritization of revenue-generating stories rather than accurate coverage of current events. Because the profit margins became slimmer, editors in these press companies were always checking content to ensure it was within their expressed guiding principles. Or, journalists felt like there was this meticulous attention to opinion, which led to “sensitive” topic neglect.

This constant feeling of being overseen, whether or not it has a factual basis, gives the invisible overseer lots of power when it comes to steering the course of publication. It is a sufficient tool that the Vietnamese government does not need to double down on censorship because journalists are reactionarily doing it to themselves in the name of preservation. Information is scarce as well, given the difficulty of the obtainment process for an official press license, regardless of status as a state, foreign, or independent media entity. Journalists’ personal relationships with government officials are necessary for information: many documents are still classified, so there is a limit on colloquially safe-to-use sources. There is government-controlled media without government-supplied information.

Future Prospects of Information Flow

Regardless of overtly discrediting independent media (by referring to independent journalism on state media as “enemies of the state” or “reactionaries”), limiting the avenues for potential licensing, tracking all of the media flow from alternative organizations, or using vaguely defined articles (117 and 331) to double down on persecution of “antistate information” and “abusing democratic freedom”, the state media has lost its hold on the public. Very few Vietnamese people consume any news anymore. Whether they are convinced by the state campaigns to discredit independents or know that all of the state media is limited in scope, the containment of the Internet was a huge step back in terms of access to content reflective of the legitimate. If there is no trusted source and no path for challengers to the centralization to follow, can the public believe anything at all?