ANTISOCIAL MEDIA: Facebook Lets Vietnam’s Cyberarmy Target Dissidents, Rejecting a Celebrity’s Plea.

For the past two years, Do Nguyen Mai Khoi has been trying painfully, futilely, to get Facebook to care about Vietnam. The Vietnamese singer and pro-democracy activist, known best simply as Mai Khoi, has tried tirelessly to warn the company of a thousands-strong pro-government Facebook group of police, military, and other Communist party loyalists who collaborate to get online dissidents booted and offline dissidents jailed. Her evidence of the group’s activity is ample, her arguments are clear, and despite the constant risk of reprisal from her own country’s leadership, her determination seemingly inexhaustible. The only problem is that Facebook doesn’t seem interested at all.

Facebook, once briefly heralded as a godsend for a country like Vietnam, where social media allows citizens to squeeze past the state’s censorship stranglehold on traditional media, has now become just another means of strangulation.

Don’t trust Facebook… you know the rest.