Read RFA coverage of this story in Vietnamese.
Social media posts from this year and last year suddenly disappeared temporarily from the Vietnamese-language Facebook pages of Radio Free Asia, Voice of America and the BBC this week.
At about 10 p.m. local time on Tuesday, all posts from 2024 and 2025 vanished from RFA’s Vietnamese Facebook page, leaving ones from 2023 and earlier. They reappeared a few minutes later.
The reason for their disappearance remains unknown.
Several RFA readers noticed the missing content and shared related photos and videos documenting it with RFA.
Voice of America, a U.S. government-funded media outlet like RFA, and the BBC also reported content disappearances on their Facebook pages.
The three media outlets have been frequently criticized by Vietnam’s communist one-party government and state media for publishing stories deemed critical of the government.
RFA contacted Meta, Facebook’s parent company, for an explanation but did not receive a response by publication time.
Past cases
The incidents were not the first time that content has disappeared or been changed for unknown reasons on the Vietnamese-language fan pages of RFA, VOA and the BBC.
On Oct. 29, 2020, the three fan pages of the respective news agencies had their names altered for unexplained reasons, other than that hackers who take issue with their content did so as a prank.
Radio Free Asia’s page was renamed “Long Live the Communist Party of Vietnam,” the VOA’s page became “Long Live Eastern Laos,” and the BBC’s page became “The Great President Ho Chi Minh.”
The incidents lasted one to two hours before the names were restored.
At that time, RFA contacted Facebook for an explanation, but received no response.
In the meantime, some pro-Vietnamese government Facebook accounts celebrated that that “new” names were in tune with the propaganda of Vietnam’s Communist Party and its leaders.
The Vietnamese government has gone so far as to request that Facebook restrict the visibility of some RFA posts in Vietnam.
For example, a Facebook status — a short message or update that users post on their profile to share their thoughts, feelings or activities — with a link to a commentary on General Secretary To Lam posted on the RFA Vietnamese fan page on Jan. 15 was blocked in Vietnam per a Ministry of Information and Communications request to Facebook.
Meta’s recent transparency report says that in the first half of 2024, Facebook restricted access in Vietnam to over 3,200 items in response to reports from the ministry’s Authority of Broadcasting and Electronic Information and the Ministry of Public Security.
Translated by Anna Vu for RFA Vietnamese. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.