These days, social networking and doing things in the cyberspace world of the Internet is a commonplace thing for most of us. You probably don’t even give it a second thought when you power up your laptop or turn on your smart phone or iPad and the Internet just appears and you happily go about your business.

Internet Blocks Exist in Vietnam, Elsewhere

But, what would you do if you suddenly couldn’t get to the sites you use every day to talk to your friends or find out about what’s going on in the world? That’s what is happening to the people in Vietnam and some other communist countries. When they try to use Facebook in Vietnam, they get a notice saying that it was blocked to security reasons and to fight against activities that are seen as being against the Party and the government.

The Vietnamese government, along with the governments in places like China, Egypt, and several others, seem to fear the fact that social media such as Facebook share too much. With all the data, photos, videos and more floating around and being shared online, it appears to worry some of these governments as to just how much is being shared of discussed when people do things like use Facebook in Vietnam.

Why Are Governments Concerned?

Statistics show that if sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc are blocked or restricted, that it only makes users try harder to access it and to do things like use Facebook in Vietnam. According to Dr. Jennifer Brinkerhoff of the George Washington University, a spokesperson at various security conferences on the topic, blocking these sites has even in some cases, caused more of a problem in the area the governments were trying to prevent, such as more activist type activities.

She said that allowing information to be passed through these sites is better because those activist points of view are then replaced by more centralized and widely accepted views instead. She added that it has been shown that social networks themselves don’t cause revolutions, and they instead help to enhance the sharing of data when people are allowed to use Facebook in Vietnam and therefore get more information out on the things that the people are upset about. Hiding or blocking sites like Facebook just appears to make things worse, and make some people want revenge against those who blocked it.

In January 2011, the way the Vietnamese government blocks Facebook received updates, and relatively common ways to work around internet censorship targeted at Facebook in Vietnam were reduced significantly. The most popular method however, connecting to a virtual private network, is still the most secure and most widely used (world-wide) method of accessing blocked sites.