{"id":54417,"date":"2025-01-25T17:29:23","date_gmt":"2025-01-26T01:29:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vietvalley.com\/facebookers-fined-for-mocking-wealthy-founder-of-budget-vietnamese-airline\/"},"modified":"2025-01-25T17:29:23","modified_gmt":"2025-01-26T01:29:23","slug":"facebookers-fined-for-mocking-wealthy-founder-of-budget-vietnamese-airline","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vietvalley.com\/en\/facebookers-fined-for-mocking-wealthy-founder-of-budget-vietnamese-airline\/","title":{"rendered":"Facebookers fined for mocking wealthy founder of budget Vietnamese airline"},"content":{"rendered":"

Read RFA coverage of this story in Vietnamese.<\/i><\/a><\/p>\n

Two Hanoi Facebook users have been fined and ordered to delete satirical content they posted online about Nguyen Thi Phuong Thao, founder and former chief executive officer of VietJet Air, according to the capital city\u2019s government and state media.<\/p>\n

VietJet Air, a low-cost airline headquartered in Hanoi, was the first privately owned carrier to be established in Vietnam, a socialist republic governed by the Communist Party. <\/p>\n

Often dubbed the \u201cbikini airline,\u201d VietJet is known for its ads featuring models in bikinis to promote resort destinations.<\/p>\n

On Jan. 20, Hanoi\u2019s Department of Information and Communications announced on its website that its Inspection Division had imposed administrative fines on two individuals identified by the initials N.Q.D. and N.T.N. <\/p>\n

Bao Dien tu Chinh phu<\/i>, the online newspaper of the government of Vietnam. republished the news and included screenshots of the offending posts<\/a>, which appeared on the Facebook accounts of Nga Nguyen and Dzung Art Nguyen. Both posts contained similar content.<\/p>\n

The posts describe a character named \u201cChi Thao\u201d \u2014 an apparent reference to VietJet Air\u2019s founder \u2014 ordering a bowl of noodles in Ho Chi Minh City. <\/p>\n

Though the dish costs only 10,000 dong, or 40 U.S. cents, the diner must pay for many extras, including chopsticks, a spoon and a window seat, mimicking the additional fees the airline imposes on passengers.<\/p>\n

The diner also faces long waits for service and has difficulty contacting the restaurant owner, a parody of the delayed flights and customer service issues often associated with VietJet.<\/p>\n

The author of the \u201cChi Thao\u201d story remains unknown, but the post went viral on Facebook in Vietnam at the beginning of January. However, many versions of the story have since disappeared from the platform.<\/p>\n

Freedom of expression<\/h4>\n

The two individuals were fined for \u201cproviding fabricated and false information, insulting honor, reputation, dignity, or harming the legitimate rights and interests of other agencies, organizations, and individuals\u201d under Article 16 of Vietnam\u2019s cybersecurity law.<\/p>\n

Human rights groups have criticized the law for restricting freedoms of expression, privacy and information, especially pointing to Article 16\u2019s overly broad definition of what constitutes propaganda against the state.<\/p>\n

Hanoi\u2019s Department of Information and Communications did not disclose the amount of the fines or confirm that the individual offended by the post was Nguyen Thi Phuong Thao, the 54-year-old self-made billionaire who established VietJet. <\/p>\n

Thao took the company public in 2017 and currently serves as chairwoman of the airline\u2019s board of directors.<\/p>\n

The department said its decision was in line with related decrees stipulating that violators can be fined 5 million-10 million dong (US$200-400) and must remove offending content.<\/p>\n

RELATED STORIES<\/b><\/p>\n

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Vietnamese Facebookers face prosecution for posts<\/a><\/p>\n

Vietnam\u2019s new internet rules bad for free speech, business: users<\/a> <\/p>\n

Vietnam tightens controls on social media users<\/a><\/p>\n

When Radio Free Asia contacted Facebook user Dzung Art Nguyen, whose name and profile photo matched those reported by state media, he confirmed posting the content but said he deleted it about an hour later. <\/p>\n

He also claimed that someone had created a fake account to repost the content after it was removed. Nguyen denied being summoned or fined by authorities.<\/p>\n

RFA was unable to reach Facebook user Nga Nguyen for verification, and calls to Hanoi\u2019s Department of Information and Communications went unanswered.<\/p>\n

VietJet Air did not respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n

Black humor suppressed<\/h4>\n

Journalist Nam Viet from Ho Chi Minh City suggested that such punishments stem from the fact that business leaders and officials, accustomed to living a life of luxury, cannot tolerate mockery aimed at them.<\/p>\n

\u201cLooking back at the history of communist regimes in Eastern Europe and Asia, you can see that caricatures and jokes targeting specific sitting officials were among the first forms of art to be eliminated,\u201d he said in a text message to RFA. \u201cAnd even political jokes, also known as black humor, were always [suppressed].\u201d<\/p>\n

Nam Viet cited the 1984 arrest and imprisonment of novelist Doan Quoc Sy as an example. Sy, whose writings had been banned by the communist government, was detained for gathering and documenting humorous anecdotes from the Vietnam War. These stories highlighted moments when North Vietnamese soldiers were astonished by the wealth they saw in the South \u2014 encounters that directly contradicted the communist regime\u2019s propaganda.<\/p>\n

Translated by Anna Vu for RFA Vietnamese. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.<\/b><\/i><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Tin t\u1eeb RFA Read More<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Read RFA coverage of this story in Vietnamese. Two Hanoi Facebook users have been fined and ordered to delete satirical content they posted online about Nguyen Thi Phuong Thao, founder and former chief executive officer of VietJet Air, according to the capital city\u2019s government and state media. VietJet Air, a low-cost airline headquartered in Hanoi, …<\/p>","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[239],"tags":[246,251],"class_list":["post-54417","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-vietnam","tag-english","tag-rfa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vietvalley.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54417","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vietvalley.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vietvalley.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vietvalley.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vietvalley.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54417"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vietvalley.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54417\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vietvalley.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vietvalley.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54417"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vietvalley.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}