Yesterday, one of the most popular website in Vietnam had been taken down or “Temporarily Suspended” as they stated on website, this incident had caused a lot of young people in this communist nation upset, a fraction of them even regretted it such as it was the contributing site which helped many of Vietnamese people relax after “long hard workday”. In my view, this occurrence can be interpreted in two particular ways.
The first aspect is about the freedom of speech in Vietnam. As many of you know, this Asian nation has a strict and rigid and crap policy about media. On one hand, they censored all information stating the info against their “integrity”, not to mention the inconvenient fact that this government readily send anyone to prison if they dare to tell the truth. On the other hand, they set crap newspaper free to do anything, including posting wrong news, crap news about some “celebrities” and of course, using press as a propaganda agent. Back to the taking down haivl incident, this is the perfect combination of these two mentioned aspect of Vietnam’s news policy due to two reasons. First, they use the censoring policy to force it to close. As stated in their announcement, haivl.com has been decried and distorted the image of Vietnamese grands and some ‘inventive’ accusations. As I see it, this is the seriously violation of law, the agent of government convicted a company without having a trial. In addition, it did not show any evidence of violations that haivl was accused. Generally, we can foresee from now on (or since a very long time ago), a person can easily convicted without any evidence, such a nightmare for this ‘impartial social’. The second reason is money, in my opinion, because haivl.com had been bought with 1.5 million dollars, a shocking number even in US, someone has been ‘enlightened’ that online news can make a fortune. So they create the chance to get money, still this is my suspicion but we will see :).
The second aspect of this occurrence is more gentle :D, that is the downside effect of this site on young Vietnamese people. Since its beginning, haivl has been being built its influence on society step by step by expanding from the site posting funny pictures to the news media center. For instance, a plenty of information which you cannot find on any website is on haivl, from many photos about military movements when China settled HD-981 to arbitrary interesting status posting on your facebook wall. This tremendous influence is bad in many ways. Firstly, it get people easily addicted due to its convenient, you just have to go to haivl and you will be updated every news. Unfortunately, those news are mostly useless and biased and that property contribute to make a number of young man become juvenile, stupid and arrogant. The next bad influence of this recently taking-down website is time-consuming. To illustrate it, my case is a good example. Due to the addictive attribute of haivl, I have been wasting time on it, about one to two hours a day. Badly, it is not a straight one or two hours, it distribute through almost entire day. I study for about 20 mins and I access that site for 2 mins, even I know no new post will be uploaded. Of course it interfered my learning but even worse, it is addictive and really hard to get it out of mind. Bottom up, I am so relieved that haivl has been taken down because that eliminated the second worst distraction, after facebook :)).
Nhật Trường 