Blogging Three Ways in Vietnam's Political Blogosphere

Contemporary Southeast Asia Vol. 39, No. 2 (2017), pp. 373–92 DOI: 10.1355/cs39-2e © 2017 ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute ISSN 0129-797X print / ISSN 1793-284X electronic Blogging Three Ways in Vietnam’s Political Blogosphere MAI DUONG This article discusses the dynamism of Vietnam’s social media landscape by identifying three kinds of blogging and the different political views espoused by Vietnamese bloggers. This classification is based on a thematic analysis of blog postings, media discussions and semi-structured interviews conducted in 2013–15. The author’s mapping of Vietnam’s blogosphere demonstrates four features: first, the growth of political blogs; second, how the blogosphere has become an arena for competing political ideologies; third, the utilization of blogs by various factions within the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) to serve their own interests; and fourth, blogs as an important source of independent news and information. Understanding political blogs in Vietnam today helps us understand how Vietnamese bloggers maximize online freedom of speech, the zigzagging attitude of the CPV in managing the Internet in an attempt to reinforce its legitimacy and the challenges blogs pose to the state-run media’s monopoly in the digital age. Keywords: Vietnamese bloggers, political blogs, online freedom, propaganda press. In global rankings on Internet freedom, international watchdogs consistently rate Vietnam very low1 due to the fact that the government has increased its control of the Internet using various monitoring methods and because it detains journalists, bloggers and netizens for espousing their political views.2 However, these surveys do not capture the complexity of the Mai Duong is an academic researching the impact of the Internet on journalism in Vietnam who has taught media studies at the...