iMAP Vietnam 2023 Internet Censorship Report

Key Findings

The OONI data in Vietnam reveals that 11.39% of visits to 2,329 websites were inaccessible across 20 different Internet Service Providers (ISP), between 1 July 2022 and 30 June 2023. Among these ISPs, blockings were found to be implemented by three major providers, Viettel Group, VNPT Corporation, and MOBIFONE Corporation. All of the blocking cases have been confirmed by OONI.

Vietnamese ISPs appear to be primarily implementing censorship through DNS and HTTP requests which serve block pages. The main types of blocked sites include political criticism sites, new media websites, and human rights websites.

Political criticism websites had the highest number of blocks, followed by foreign news websites and human rights issue websites. The fourth was social networking pages. Unlike the good accessibility      status as in the 2022 report where social networking sites were inaccessible only 1.8% of the time, social networking sites were relatively controlled in 2023 and were inaccessible 5.1% of the time.

WhatsApp and Telegram appeared to be accessible in all tested networks during the testing period. Facebook Messenger showed anomalies in February 2023 but only on certain networks.     

Versions of the full report can be downloaded at the links below.

For this report, please note the clarification and correction of errors in this page.