Minister of Information and Communications Truong Minh Tuan (Source: VNA) Tuan said Vietnam is among the topcountries in terms of the use of social networking sites, with nearly 45million Facebook users and also one of the top 10 Youtube subscribingcountries.
Due to limited law awareness, part ofthe general public were exposed to and incited by pornographic, violent andfalse information, including distorted ones released by hostile forces, mostlyon foreign social media pages, which has worried the public, he admitted.
The ministry has asked Google to removemore than 2,200 video clips that blackened and spoke ill of Party and Stateleaders on its Youtube channel. As of April 12, the Internet search engine gianttook off 1,299 toxic clips and dealt with a reactionary channel with 517 clips.
Recently, the ministry also urgedGoogle to establish a mechanism to prevent and delete toxic information violatingVietnam’s law on some of its platforms such as blogs and websites.
In the coming months, it will alsowork with Facebook to remove pages falsely named after Party and State leaders,as well as work with the Vietnam Posts and Telecommunications Group (VNPT) andthe military-run telecom provider Viettel which are known as suppliers ofdigital information archive hiring service to foreign individuals andorganisations on the regard.
Other measures include building a precautionaryand warning tool, a management mechanism that enables the use of a filtering andupdating system that promptly discovers and halts the display of violatedinformation.
On the cyber security and safetyissue raised by lawmakers following the recent cyber attacks against severalaviation units and agencies, Tuan admitted that such attacks tend to increaseworldwide in quantity, scale and complexity.
He cited a 2016 survey conducted bythe ministry and the Vietnam Information Security Association as saying that 41percent of agencies and organisations did not check malwares on their networks,51 percent of respondents were yet to issue a standard response process in caseof incidents, and 73 percent were yet to adopt information safety measures inline with regulations and domestic and global standards.
The minister attributed the situationto limited awareness of information safety among sectors and businesses’executives, the shortage of competent experts specialised in the field, technicalstandard system and investment resources.
He pledged to continue refining the legalcorridor in the field, adding that the ministry has directed concerned agenciesto coordinate, alert and directly respond to several important and urgent caseswhile issuing a process to check and ensure cyber information safety, deal withincidents and conduct information security rehearsals.
The ministries’ relevant agencieshave offered guidelines, supervision, warning and technical support toministries, agencies and localities, as well as strengthen cooperation with theministries of National Defence and Public Security via information sharing andcollaboration mechanisms, he said.
Talking further about this issue,Deputy PM Vu Duc Dam underscored the importance of synchronous measures, fromlegal framework, institutions to technical solutions, and most importantly,users’ awareness, adding that the association of IT enterprises needs to play arole in improving public awareness of this effort.
Concluding the event, NationalAssembly Chairwoman Nguyen Thi Kim Ngan asked the NA Secretary General to workwith relevant agencies to announce the NA Standing Committee’s conclusion onthe question-and-answer session.
The NA’s Ethnic Council, committeesand lawmakers were required to strengthen supervision on the delivery ofpromises made by ministers and heads of sectors, contributing to dealing witharising issues together with the government and meeting expectation ofconstituents and people across the country.-VNA
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