Image credit – Dan Vineberg
With social media, everyone is pretty much connected to each other in some way. It also makes it easy to organize events, like inviting people to a gathering like a wedding, a movie, a charity, a blood drive, and so on. It can also be used to help organize protests, which is what citizens in Vietnam did over the weekend, or at least they tried to.
It turns out that the Vietnamese government wasn’t too thrilled about protestors using Facebook to organize rallies and protests, and have blocked access to it to prevent further gatherings via the social media platform. We’ve seen this happen before, like in 2014 where the Chinese government blocked access to Instagram to prevent their citizens from seeing the protests taking place in Hong Kong.
So what were the protests about? Just in case you haven’t been following the news, there has been an environmental disaster in which a steel complex built by a Taiwanese company discharged toxic material into the water, which in turn resulted in mass deaths of fish at aquatic farms and waters.
The Taiwanese company in question, Formosa, denied any wrongdoing, while the local government has attributed the deaths to toxic algae bloom. The protests were namely over how there has not been any action on the part of the company or the government.