Facebook agreed to censor posts after Vietnam slowed traffic – sources

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-vietnam-facebook-exclusive/exclusive-facebook-agreed-to-censor-posts-after-vietnam-slowed-traffic-sources-idUSKCN2232JX

by Longprao • 6 years ago

235 93 6 years ago

reuters.com

gigatexal3• 6 years ago

I'm not surprised. They're a publicly traded company with a fiduciary to operate in the shareholder's best interest not be some moral beacon of truth.

hau2• 6 years ago

Nothing prevents shareholders to pursue ethical goals or at least make an ethical decisions once in a while. Somehow you assume their best interest necessarily is in conflict with morals or truth but I don't see it. Decision to implement unjust ruling is unusual. It's not surprising for Facebook to do so, I agree. But it's not a rule for a publicly traded company by a virtue of fiduciary responsibilities.

gigatexal3• 6 years ago

If that were the case if being moral was profitable then more companies would be supporting the countless open source projects they use monetarily than just abiding by the literal reading of the GPL and not giving back. How is it moral to build a cloud provider on the backs of open source software and not supporting those devs and teams that make said software as their hobby as just one example.

MiroF4• 6 years ago

This hurts their engineer recruitment in the US - which isn't in the shareholders best interest.

stuff4ben4• 6 years ago

I doubt most shareholders care about that at all. Feeling good vs making money?

enitihas• 6 years ago

That is pure fantasy. If engineers cared about fb doing shady things, fb had already done enough to tilt the scales.

stuff4ben4• 6 years ago

I hate that HN allows downvotes for disagreement rather than off-topic or non-sensical commenting. You make a good point. I'm reminded of the movie Avatar, "there’s one thing that shareholders hate more than bad press, and that’s a bad quarterly statement."

scrollbar• 6 years ago

I'd imagine the downvotes are because it's a factually inaccurate statement (as I understand it). Duty to maximize profits is a myth, which I think I first heard about here on HN!

https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co...

zentiggr7• 6 years ago

So shareholders are the problem. Let's abolish them and see what else interferes with good ethical choices and fix that and keep going. That's how things get better.

stuff4ben4• 6 years ago

That's infeasible in our economy. Generation of wealth is something that is needed and beneficial to society. Abolishing shareholders is not the answer. Having better politicians (i.e. not corrupt) to reign in capitalist markets to enforce moral behavior would be a better choice.

mcphage2• 6 years ago

Well, Facebook just taught every country in the world how they can be controlled to take down content that country doesn’t like.

ipsum2• 6 years ago

Facebook is obligated to follow the laws of the countries its in, or are you saying that country laws don't matter?

ectospheno• 6 years ago

Legal isn’t a subset of good. Illegal isn’t a subset of bad. You can be legal and morally bankrupt at the same time.

Facebook could be ethical and have half a billion less dollars or do what they did. Interesting choice that I’m sure isn’t on a slippery slope at all.

mcphage2• 6 years ago

They didn't do it to follow Vietnam's laws, they did it because Vietnam was throttling their site.

NhanH2• 6 years ago

Just tangentially related to the topic at hand, but I have a question to ask HN. The main trans-Pacific cable connection between Vietnam and the US tends to be damaged several times a year (3<n<10 is my guess), which severely slow downs any connection to the outside of Vietnam during the time it is under maintenance. This always happens suspiciously during major political holiday (Independence day and the likes), so Vietnamese has just assumed that is a blatant censorship attempt. The wiki page has an outage section you can read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asia-America_Gateway , it doesn't list anything beyond 2018, but the situation is the same.

So my question is, how likely it is that the cable system are just really shitty? Or is the assumption of bald-faced censorship correct?

netsharc• 6 years ago

Which country's independence day/holidays?

Imagine if your job is to drive the tractor on the beach that would "chop" the cable up once or twice every year...

NhanH2• 6 years ago

Vietnam has an Independence day, and a National Day, which are the two holidays that always get the outages.

phonon• 6 years ago

"State media at the time blamed the slowdown on maintenance to undersea cables, and state telecoms firms apologized for unstable access to Facebook."

londons_explore4• 6 years ago

Undersea cable is pretty unreliable. Most major cables expect to break every few years.

Usually breaks are caused by humans (ships pulling anchors, sabotage/spying). Sometimes they're natural (caused by wildlife, ocean floor movement, flaws in the cable design).

Fixes usually take a few hours if they happen at the endpoints, or weeks if they happen somewhere under the ocean.

Interestingly, spying breaks always involve three simultaneous breaks in the cable. The cable is broken at two points, and then broken at a third point in the middle to put spy equipment. They do this so the people operating the cable can't tell where the spy equipment was inserted, since otherwise you can tell where a cable is broken or being tampered with by sending light down the cable and seeing how long before light reflects off the broken bit and comes back to the end.

Using statistical methods, you can see how frequently you'd expect a cable to break at different points along it's length simultaneously, and it happens a lot more than raw chance would suggest.

oldsklgdfth• 6 years ago

I was under the impression that underwater cables were fairly reliable, but it seems they require frequent repair.

Per wikipedia: > Still, cable breaks are by no means a thing of the past, with more than 50 repairs a year in the Atlantic alone,[48] and significant breaks in 2006, 2008, and 2009.

abnry• 6 years ago

Do you have any references about these spying breaks? This is the first I've heard of it and it is fascinating.

rhacker• 6 years ago

What's the point of spying on traffic you can't read?

user59944612• 6 years ago

Isn't it heavily depending on the location of the cable?

I'd expect cables in shallow water in fishing areas to be broken more often than deep floating cables in the middle of the Atlantic.

anthony_doan• 6 years ago

caused by wildlife

Can you further explain this part? It sounds so out there with undersea cable.

The only thing I can think of is that wildfire cause erosion in soil which wash off into the sea and damage the end point?

illvm• 6 years ago

since otherwise you can tell where a cable is broken or being tampered with by sending light down the cable and seeing how long before light reflects off the broken bit and comes back to the end.

IIRC at BSidesLV last year there was a vendor selling optical splicing modules which were rather difficult to detect using this technique.

bogomipz2• 6 years ago

"Undersea cable is pretty unreliable."

This is not true. Submarine cable installations generally have a lifespan of 20-25 years although that's even being extended now to 30 years with advances in WDM gear. Also in water deeper than 1500 meters the cables are typically laid on the ocean floor. This is done because it is beyond the limit of trawl fishing anchors.

"Interestingly, spying breaks always involve three simultaneous breaks in the cable. The cable is broken at two points, and then broken at a third point in the middle to put spy equipment."

Yeah this is not true at all. Where did you get this from? Fiber cables can be tapped by simply adding a bend radius to the cable which allows it to leak. [1], Further you can shoot a light down both ends of a fiber and easily discern that there is more than one break in the cable.

[1] https://www.thefoa.org/tech/ref/appln/tap-fiber.html

LeifCarrotson• 6 years ago

Most of the outages have been located at the intra-Asia segments between Hong Kong and Singapore, with most problems occurring in the Vietnam section, while the segment between Hong Kong and the Philippines seems to have fewer problems. The segments between the Philippines and the United States are quite stable.

If you can go thousands of miles across the Pacific and be "quite stable", and a shallower, shorter run through similar ocean floor and ship traffic conditions between HK and the Philippines suffers fewer outages than one to Vietnam, yeah, censorship seems like a pretty reasonable conclusion.

alephnan• 6 years ago

Hong Kong has a large financial sector. IIRC, Vietnam did not have a derivatives market until a few years ago, and a few months in only had $20 million in trading volume.

jawngee• 6 years ago

I have Viettel fiber and I very rarely feel the effects of cable disruptions. Most times I wouldn't even notice until someone complains about it on an expat or neighborhood group.

This is less the case for people using other providers.

a0122• 6 years ago

They throttle the throughout on evening. Checked the internet at night and day is literally night vs. day where the internet goes down to Kbps but at morning goes up to 100Mbps normally. It's totally bullshit.

user59944612• 6 years ago

Plot twist: Fishermen are purposefully collecting underwater cables and selling them for scrape.

https://www.computerworld.com/article/2541664/fishermen-pull...

Of course there are also accidental breakages and other things. That is to say there are many root causes, not necessarily intuitive.

callamdelaney• 6 years ago

The main issue iirc is that people keep stealing their undersea cabling [1] meaning that their speeds are often significantly reduced.

[1] http://texyt.com/vietnam+internet+cable+stolen+by+thieves+00...

blago2• 6 years ago

Well, that explains it. I've been using FB on VPN for more than a month until last week. At the time I thought that the outages were due to increased traffic - perhaps they were routing locally and hadn't provisioned enough resources. I wish they didn't buckle.

keithnoizu• 6 years ago

Internet has been all around wonky in the region lately. I'm in Cambodia but opennet routes through vietnam. Things like S3 buckets getting bps download speeds on the regular connection and jumping to mbps on vpn. Hours versus seconds of download time.

piokoch• 6 years ago

Kind of surprising. I can somehow understand that FB bends under pressure from Chinese government - huge population of a "superpower" country. But Vietnam? It looks as if FB was forced to squeeze every cent of their revenue.

FB might have just opened Pandora's box with all kind of restriction requests coming from all over the World.

blago2• 6 years ago

Vietnam has a fairly large population and FB is the platform of choice for communication and to a large degree shopping. Small businesses love it.

For anecdotal evidence, I have been ordering food on FB every day for the last month. My wife is watching a life-streaming apparel sale as we speak.

JCharante• 6 years ago

Facebook is truly huge. Several expats I know that had previously quit Facebook have had to unquit because it's so ingrained in society. Checking menus and hours (Facebook pages will be more up to date than google maps entries), messaging to order delivery, live streams for online shopping, finding an apartment, buying motorbikes...

Relating to your small businesses, a lot of them will have their own shippers to save on having to pay the cut from a food delivery app. When I needed a reusable mask after the ones I had were running out at the end of my quarantine, I just messaged a guy who had his online business and an hour later my shipment had arrived (he used an inter-city courier, but you get the point). Somehow being in a city of 8 million makes you feel in more of a community than being in a city of 150k.

I've had a bakery message me to ask if I was in the mood for ordering cupcakes when they still had extra at the end of the day (and I was). A few weeks after a new japanese ramen restaurant told me they only offered take out, they messaged me to tell me that they now offered delivery. It's an amazing channel for businesses to reach their customers.

It's also a really convenient place to get news, because since all news sources are government approved then there's no fake news to worry about. (and by fake news I mean sensationalist stuff, not anything serious relating to politics. I obviously understand the shortcomings with such a system when it relates to criticism of the government)

It's also really nice because you don't have pseudo-science crap on your feed (since sharing that stuff is a fineable offense). Although you still have to watch out for the moms in their Zalo groupchats.

dathinab• 6 years ago

If you look at the history of Facebook it becomes clear that they don't care about morals at all.

It's just about money, if upholding moralic aspects does profit then through a better image and more trust they will do so. If it doesn't cost them much they might still do so. But the moment it affects their profit they will not do so, through they might pretend they hadn't had a choice or similar.

pcurve• 6 years ago

yeah. they know shareholders will start punishing share price once they set precedent of not backing down under pressure of gov't in larger markets. They've rationalized it by thinking it's not their fight to fight, and that in longer term, freer speech will prevail.

lonelappde3• 6 years ago

Facebook obeys the law everywhere it is enforced. Some laws are better than than others.

Facebook makes essentially 0 profit in poor countries like Vietnam. Their presence there is a more general wanting to be everywhereand have everyone on board to support their users and advertisers in wealthy nations.

yesplorer2• 6 years ago

Did you read the article?

Vietnam's digital ad market was worth some $550 million in 2018 and 70% of that went to Facebook and Google.

zentiggr7• 6 years ago

Either reason is a poor excuse to continue to provide service in any country that uses political pressure to modify content.

FB and anyone else requested to remove politically motivated content should leave the country until that practice is stopped, and only resume service as long as no requests are made.

I know money and network effects will win out anyway but that's what I believe will pressure these governments to relent.

matheusmoreira• 6 years ago

Why wouldn't it? The alternative is to cease operations in that country and lose access to all of its citizens.

CaptArmchair2• 6 years ago

Vietnam is a complex country. Wikipedia gives more background:

Vietnam is a unitary Marxist-Leninist one-party socialist republic, one of the two communist states (the other being Laos) in Southeast Asia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam#Government_and_politic...

Politically, it's still an autocratic state, but economically the country has opened up to the global market since the 1980's, not unlike China.

Human rights have long been a matter of much controversy between the Government of Vietnam and some international human rights organizations and Western governments, particularly that of the United States. Under the current constitution, the Communist Party of Vietnam is the only one allowed to rule, the operation of all other political parties being outlawed. Other human rights issues concern freedom of association, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Vietnam

Vietnam is home to several ethnic minorities and a range of religions and beliefs. There haven been frequent regional tensions and uprisings over the past decades and Vietnam itself has also had disputes over borders with Cambodia and China right after the end of the Vietnam War.

Vietnam and Facebook have a rocky past, but Facebook is well embedded in Vietnamese society by now. For instance, it is a bedrock for small business owners as it allows them to escape restrictions which are enforced on street shops. So, it's a source of wealth, but at the same time, it irks authorities enough to create tensions.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-07/vietnam-r...

zentiggr7• 6 years ago

So if Facebook pulls out of Vietnam, their economy is likely to suffer because of their own internal politics.

Sounds like another excellent reason to leave the country and refuse to support the regime until actual democracy is in place.

(Of course, you could say that argues that companies should leave the US now as well, but that's another can of worms.)

Facebook doesn't have any requirement to be embedded in society, anywhere. And regardless of its spot benefits anywhere, it is still an overall negative influence.

CaptArmchair2• 6 years ago

Good points!

If Facebook pulls out, the general population - not the economic or political elites - will suffer for it.

A political regime based on a framework of democratic values, beliefs and morals can only emerge if there's infrastructure to spread the idea: press, education, common causes and interests and so on are needed before change happens.

Facebook is just one element in that change. There's the narrative that Facebook enabled the Arab Spring uprisings. It did so because it filled the vacuum where free and independent press would exist.

You're right, Facebook doesn't have any requirement to be embedded in society. It's a private company. And one that claims to be anything but a content publisher (to avoid all kinds of pesky litigation). However, everyone has embraced and incorporated Facebook into the fabric of society due to it's ease of use. And so Facebook very much has a moral responsibility similar to that of any newspaper company.

After all, newspapers ranging from NYT to WaPo to the Globe aren't inherently required to publish (inter)nationally. They were originally local newspapers.

The big issue with Facebook is that it has acknowledged that it is as an advertising business, while people clearly want to use it as a publishing platform to spread ideas. There's a massive amount of dissonance to the detriment of everyone, including Facebook which gets a bad rep for it's actions.

lonelappde3• 6 years ago

It's easy to be mad at Facebook, but more productive to build an promote alternative to give people better choices.

908087• 6 years ago

Why not both?

preoccupied1985• 6 years ago

Attention is a scarce resource

leephillips2• 6 years ago

I'm a little surprised that people are still surprised about this kind of thing. Various countries, groups, and, probably, individuals have a big say in what you see returned as search results on Google, what's available on YouTube, and more. Until, possibly, very recently, Pakistan had veto power over what Google was allowed to show on YouTube—and not just in Pakistan.

https://www.wired.com/2016/01/youtube-returns-to-pakistan-af...

koheripbal2• 6 years ago

I'm surprised you think people are surprised. Where are people expressing surprise that this sort of activity is going on?

leephillips2• 6 years ago

I’m surprised that you’re surprised that I’m surprised that people are still surprised about this kind of thing. Right below your comment (this answers your question “Where...”) is a comment that begins, “Kind of surprising.”

Facebook agreed to censor posts after Vietnam slowed traffic – sources

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