The Vietnamese government has at last opened an official Facebook account, perhaps signalling a thawing in its attitude towards the social media network.
Speaking at a press conference introducing a resolution on e-government on October 21, director of the government portal, news.chinhphu.vn, Vi Quang Dao, announced that the account, only available in Vietnamese, opened earlier this month. It will include information about government and prime ministerial decisions.
"We’re sending information to local news agencies but not all of them are published," Dao said. "So we decided to share it on Facebook so that people can find all the documents they’re interested in."
The Facebook account had 35,000 likes as of October 22 afternoon.
Dao said the move followed dozens of fake government accounts so far.
"We’re really concerned with these problems," he said. "It seems that we are going to face lots of challenges managing the account."
