By Francesco Guarascio and Phuong Nguyen
HANOI (Reuters) -Vietnam’s technology ministry has ordered telecommunication service providers to block the messaging app Telegram for not cooperating in combating alleged crimes committed by its users, in a move that Telegram said was surprising.
In a document, dated May 21 and signed by the deputy head of the telecom department at the technology ministry, telecommunication companies were ordered to take measures to block Telegram and report on them to the ministry by June 2.
The ministry was acting on behalf of the country’s cybersecurity department after police reported that 68% of the 9,600 Telegram channels and groups in Vietnam violated the law, citing fraud, drug trafficking and “cases suspected of being related to terrorism” among the illegal activities carried out through the app, the document seen by Reuters said.
The ministry asked telecommunication service providers “to deploy solutions and measures to prevent Telegram’s activities in Vietnam,” the document said.
After publication of the Reuters article, the government confirmed the measures against Telegram on its web portal.
“Telegram is surprised by those statements,” a company representative told Reuters on Friday.
“We have responded to legal requests from Vietnam on time. This morning, we received a formal notice from the Authority of Communications regarding a standard service notification procedure required under new telecom regulations. The deadline for the response is May 27, and we are processing the request,” the Telegram representative said.
A technology ministry official said the move followed Telegram’s failure to share user data with the government when asked as part of criminal investigations.
The Vietnamese police and state news outlets have repeatedly warned people of possible crime, frauds and data breaches on Telegram channels and groups.
Telegram, which competes globally with other social media apps such as Facebook’s WhatsApp and WeChat, was still available in Vietnam on Friday.
Vietnam’s ruling Communist Party maintains tight media censorship and tolerates little dissent. The country has repeatedly asked companies like Facebook, Google’s YouTube and TikTok to coordinate with authorities to stamp out content deemed “toxic”, including offensive, false and anti-state content.
Telegram is accused of not applying laws that require social media to monitor, remove and block information that violate the law, according to the document.
Also, the document said that according to information from the police, “many groups with tens of thousands of participants were created by opposition and reactionary subjects spreading anti-government documents”.
The free-to-use platform with close to 1 billion users worldwide has been involved in controversies across the world on security and data breach concerns, including in France where its founder, Pavel Durov, was briefly detained last year.
French President Emmanuel Macron is set to visit Vietnam from Sunday.
(Reporting by Francesco Guarascio and Phuong Nguyen; Editing by John Mair, Stephen Coates, Shri Navaratnam and Leslie Adler)
