US tech giants face human rights concerns over Vietnam investments

Tech giant Meta announced this week it will manufacture virtual reality headsets in Vietnam, creating about 1,000 jobs, but the parent company of Facebook has not commented on whether it discussed freedom of speech with leaders of a government that regularly jails its citizens for expressing even mild dissent on social media.

Meta’s Global Affairs President Nick Clegg was in Vietnam’s capital Hanoi on Monday, meeting Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh. Clegg met the country’s president and Communist Party general secretary, To Lam, at the end of September, meaning he had held discussions with the people holding three of the country’s four top political posts.

“Vietnam continues to be an important country for Meta,” Clegg said after his talks in Hanoi concluded with a commitment by the company to manufacture its Quest 3S headsets in Vietnam.

Meta said Clegg’s talks highlighted the company’s “commitment to supporting the country’s growth as a leading digital economy in Southeast Asia,” adding that Clegg and Chinh discussed economic and trade cooperation, the development of artificial intelligence and the possibility of Meta supporting Vietnam’s small and medium-sized businesses.

But there was no comment from the social media giant about whether Clegg talked to Vietnam’s leaders about protecting the right to self-expression of the more than 75 million Vietnam-based Facebook users.  

In August, social media poster Le Phu Tuan was jailed for four years and eight months for putting 21 videos on Facebook that prosecutors said included content “abusing freedom and democracy to infringe upon the interests of the state and the legitimate rights and interests of organizations and individuals.” 

He was one of a growing number of Vietnamese to be prosecuted under the loosely worded Article 331 of the Criminal Code. Since the beginning of the year, at least 12 people have been arrested and eight imprisoned under the article.

“A quick survey of Vietnam’s over 160 political prisoners will reveal that just about all of them are imprisoned in part for what they wrote online, and particularly on Facebook, but evidently that doesn’t matter to Meta anymore,” Asia Human Rights and Labor Advocates Director Phil Robertson told Radio Free Asia.

“The final kick in the teeth for the free expression aspirations of Vietnamese on the platform is Clegg’s announcement that Meta will produce their virtual reality headsets in Vietnam.

“With the leverage it gains over the company with control over that supply chain, you can bet that the Vietnamese government will expect Meta to take down content the government doesn’t like whenever the government demands it,” Robertson said.

Meta had not responded to requests for comment from RFA about whether Clegg had discussed human rights with Lam and Chinh, by time of publication. 

Meta stresses the importance of freedom of expression and enabling people to express themselves as freely as possible although rights groups have criticized it for restricting Facebook posts in the face of pressure from authoritarian governments. 

Meta says it has a process for responding to government requests and it considers company policies along with local laws and international human rights standards.

Vietnam, which has also adopted a requirement that foreign tech firms store data there, has been rated “not free” by Washington-based Freedom House, with a score of 19 out of 100 in its 2024 Freedom in the World report and no tech giant has located a data center there.

“The authorities have increasingly cracked down on citizens’ use of social media and the internet to voice dissent and share uncensored information,” the free-speech advocacy group said.

On Tuesday, Alphabet’s Google broke ground on a US$2 billion data center in Malaysia, saying it planned to invest more than $3 billion there by 2030. It is also reportedly planning a $1 billion dollar investment in a regional data and cloud center in Thailand, according to the Reuters news agency.

“My government aims to empower every Thai citizen with the digital literacy needed to reduce inequalities and provide greater opportunities for all,” Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra said on Monday.

“Thailand not only offers resilient digital infrastructure and stable utilities, but also upholds technological neutrality.”

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Vietnam’s top leader Lam also met Google executives in the U.S. at the end of September, but there was no confirmation of media reports it might  build a “hyperscale” data center close to Ho Chi Minh City.

Vietnamese state media reports on the general secretary’s New York meeting with Google’s vice president for government affairs and public policy said that Karan Bhatia cited this year’s opening of a Google office in Ho Chi Minh City and the manufacturing of phones and components there as evidence of his company’s commitment to its partnership with Vietnam.

“He expressed his hope to cooperate with the country in AI development, a sphere of Google’s strength that could be greatly useful to Vietnam,” the Vietnam News Service reported.

The company had not responded to requests for comment from RFA on the possibility of a data center in Vietnam by time of publication. Nor did it respond to questions about Vietnam’s jailing of YouTube users whose content was considered critical of the government.

Those users include Nguyen Vu Binh, jailed for seven years in September for “propaganda against the state,” under another article of the Criminal Code, 117, which rights groups say is vaguely worded.

Since the beginning of the year, Vietnam has arrested nine people and sentenced at least 12 to prison under Article 117, according to RFA statistics.

“Vietnam has become the worst rights abusing country in ASEAN after war-torn Myanmar, but you would never know it by the way that Meta, other Western companies, and associated governments are piling into the country to make investments,” said Robertson.

“Vietnam has perfected the rights abusing paradigm of Western business clasping hands with brutal single party dictatorship, and President To Lam will preside over this arrangement with an iron fist.”

Iman Muttaqin Yusof in Kuala Lumpur contributed to this story.

Edited by Taejun Kang.