In May, President of the Cambodian Senate Hun Sen ordered Cambodia’s Deputy Prime Minister (DPM) and Minister for Foreign Affairs Sok Chenda Sophea to work with Vietnam to identify people using Vietnamese-language comments to insult him on TikTok and Facebook. Hun Sen complained about being attacked in comments listed under a video about the proposed Funan Techo Canal project that has sparked controversy in Vietnam, and demanded that the Vietnamese government take action.
Hun Sen’s demand is likely to be futile and counterproductive. The Cambodian leader must know that Hanoi has little ability to control the online posts of the many on his long list of online critics, including “citizens of Vietnam, overseas separatists or bilingual ethnic Khmer Krom”. (The Khmer Krom is a Khmer-speaking community in southern Vietnam whose demand for indigenous status has not been recognised by Hanoi.)
In Vietnam, the government exercises online control through monitoring and selective intervention, often in the form of requests for social media platforms to remove anti-government content. It is unreasonable to think Vietnam would mobilise resources to check one social media network when there are over 70 million active Vietnamese social media users just for Hun Sen.
In full: https://fulcrum.sg/hun-sens-counterproductive-attempt-to-tame-vietnamese-online-critics/
