Vietnam regulates blogs, social media with new rule

Vietnam's government has announced a new rule which said blogs and social media profiles belonging to individuals and businesses should only contain personal information.

According to Vietnamese news site Tuoitrenews, the new regulation was signed by prime minister Nguyen Tan Dung on July 15, 2013, announced on Friday and will reportedly come into effect from September 1, 2013.

The clause states "personal information webpage is a webpage created by an individual on their own or via a social network. This page should be used to provide and exchange information of that individual; it does not represent other individual or organization, and is not allowed to provide complied information."

Hoang Vinc Bao, director of the broadcasting and electronic information department at the Ministry of Information and Communication also added personal electronic sites are allowed to put news owned by that person, and are not allowed to "quote", "gather" or summarize information from press organizations and government sites.

Facebook users however, have slammed the new rule, The Bangkok Post reported. Huong Nguyen, another user wrote that the decree was "evidence that the government doesn't understand the trend of society to become more open".

Last September, a southern Vietnamese court jailed three bloggers for posting political articles on a banned Vietnamese site and their own blogs, which a court deems as undermining the country's government and communist rule.