John Paul M. Joaquin Tech 04.06.2023 05:Apr AM EDT

Vietnam To Probe TikTok Over Harmful Content

Some countries in Southeast Asia are starting to come down on TikTok as well.

The Vietnamese government recently announced it would soon probe TikTok over harmful content and its operations in its country.

The popular China-owned video-sharing app is a popular platform for video-sharing and e-commerce in Southeast Asia, per the South China Morning Post. The app has 50 million users of legal age in Vietnam alone, per DetaReportal.

Vietnamese Investigation Of TikTok Details

The Vietnamese government mentioned in its announcement it would probe TikTok's operations sometime in May to ensure the company complies with tax payments, commercial policies, and, most particularly, content management, according to a Reuters report.

Le Quang Tu Do, head of the Vietnamese government's information ministry's Department of Radio, Television, and Electronic Information, said that the video-sharing platform recently allowed "toxic, offensive, false, and superstitious" content, violating the country's regulations on content management.

The ministry claims to have issued warnings to TikTok about the content it allows on its platform for Vietnam and has instructed the company to make changes, but it seems the company has yet to make effective changes on that front, per VN Express.

As a result, the country's Authority of Broadcasting and Electronic Information told TikTok's Vietnam office that a government delegation would visit it in the second quarter to put the company under a full investigation in May.

A TikTok spokesperson said in a statement to Tech In Asia that the upcoming investigation is an inspection the Vietnamese government routinely plans to ensure that tech companies follow its laws - not just TikTok. The company also welcomes the opportunity to listen to and address the Vietnamese government's concerns about its operations; it is even willing to share the progress it made in the country in the past four years.

The company reports in its latest community guideline enforcement report that it had removed 1.7 million videos in the country during the fourth quarter of 2022 due to violations of its policies. It also received 292 requests from the government regarding uploads - two-thirds of which were for removal.

In a statement to Reuters, TikTok Vietnam added that it upgraded its guidelines, effective Apr. 24, to make its rules more transparent and how it would enforce them.

Increasing Scrutiny On TikTok

Vietnam is not the only country investigating TikTok for various reasons, chief among them is its potential to become a threat to national security due to its way of collecting information stored on a device.

As a result, Australia and New Zealand recently joined the global trend to ban TikTok from government-issued devices and networks to prevent official and confidential information from landing in the hands of the Chinese government.

Meanwhile, the government is in the process to determine if it should enact the bipartisan bill that prohibits using the Chinese-owned social media app over national security concerns. The fervor to pass the act is slowly decreasing though - Republican Senator Rand Paul took a stand in opposition to the TikTok ban in the US.