How Vietnam and the US Differ in Using State Power to Regulate TikTok

Lam Le is a fellow at Tech Policy Press.

As TikTok finalized a sale to United States investors in January, the platform was penalized in Vietnam, where authorities fined it 880 million dong ($33,800) for misleading users about data practices.

Both countries had threatened to ban TikTok over user safety. But while the US forced the company to divest its American operations over fears of Chinese political influence, Vietnam has taken a different route, using law enforcement and interagency pressure to push the platform to censor content it deems toxic.

Vietnam’s Competition Commission fined TikTok following an inspection of its compliance with consumer protection laws. The agency found that the platform had failed to establish a mechanism for users to consent to how their personal data is used, included prohibited clauses in its standard terms and conditions, misled users about the nature of their transactions with business entities, and failed to provide a complaints and redress mechanism for vulnerable groups. TikTok said it has begun making adjustments to comply with the regulator’s recommendations.

“At a high level, I think both the US and Vietnam appear to be pursuing a similar goal: preventing sensitive user data from being controlled by service providers outside the country,” said Diyi Liu, a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Tracking and Society at the University of Copenhagen. But that goal alone, as recent privacy incidents have made clear, does not translate to 'stronger privacy protections for users, and under certain conditions may even undermine them,” Liu added.

US-based TikTok users confronted this reality when the app required them to consent to more granular data collection, including geolocation, or lose access. The move prompted calls to delete TikTok in protest and pushed some users toward alternative platforms independent of Big Tech, such as Upscroll. “Restructuring TikTok may reduce foreign-control risk, but it doesn’t change the platform’s incentives to collect more data,” Ronni K. Gothard Christiansen, Technical Privacy Engineer and CEO at consent management platform AesirX.io, told Tech Policy Press. “Divestment is a sovereignty remedy, not a privacy remedy.”

In Vietnam, the timing of the TikTok fine coincided with another 810 million dong ($31,300) fine imposed on VNG, which owns Zalo, the country’s most popular messaging app. The move followed public backlash over Zalo’s ‘take it or leave it ’update to its terms of use last December.

Users were given an ultimatum: accept all terms governing how their data is collected, stored, and shared, or face account deletion within 45 days. The backlash drove a surge in downloads of WhatsApp and Viber as users explored alternatives, some going as far as boycotting Zalo, despite its central role in daily life in Vietnam, from personal communication and shopping to business dealings and government announcements.

“Vietnam fining TikTok and Zalo on the same day is a clear signal about governability: the state is enforcing consumer choice and transparency around commercial use of personal data,” Christiansen said. “The fines are modest, but the precedent is clear — platform consent can’t just be a checkbox or a take-it-or-leave-it condition.”

It was also a symbolic move that has had a calming effect on the public, Nguyen Quang Dong, director of Hanoi-based Institute for Policy Studies and Media Development, told Tech Policy Press.

Vietnam’s Personal Data Protection Law only came into effect in January this year, so it could not be used as the basis for fining Zalo. Instead, it was the Competition Commission, an antitrust government body, that fined the tech platforms, under the guise of protecting consumer rights.

“In the area of handling locally unlawful and harmful content, Vietnamese authorities have, over several years, demonstrated a strong capacity to discipline platforms operating in a large domestic market through coordinated, top-down inspections and enforcement actions,” said Liu.

Unlike the US, Vietnam does not have the political or economic leverage to compel a TikTok sale. Neither does it have the scale and resources like China to build its own social media platform, as multiple failed attempts have shown. What the country does have is leverage in terms of market access — a rapidly growing economy of 100 million people — that it has proven over the years to be enough to compel foreign platforms to comply with its demands.

Back in 2023, Vietnam’s Ministry of Information and Communications launched a probe into TikTok over content it deemed “to pose a threat to the country’s youth, culture and tradition,” warning that non-compliance could result in cutting the platform off advertisers, banks and e-commerce revenue, or even a blanket ban. The authorities later concluded that TikTok had failed to protect children's privacy and had allowed “illegal content” to spread. This includes content that opposes the state, insults national symbols, incites violence, or spreads false information that causes public disorder, as per Vietnam's cybersecurity law. TikTok signed an admission of wrongdoing and pledged corrective action, state media reported.

Not just TikTok, but also Facebook and YouTube, have consistently complied with over 90% of Vietnamese government takedown requests.

Before 2020, enforcement of user privacy mostly took a back seat compared to online censorship in Vietnam. The government’s focus on user privacy since then, Dong said, reflects not just the country playing catch-up toward more comprehensive governance of online platforms, but also rising public pressure, driven by data leaks and online scams, courtesy of scam compounds in neighboring Cambodia.

The Vietnamese government’s success in using state power and market leverage to compel foreign platforms to censor unlawful content now serves as a blueprint for pressuring companies to take user privacy and consent more seriously — reinforcing the one-party state’s control over online speech.

The US approach, by contrast, has focused on restructuring ownership rather than shaping platform behavior. The transfer of control over TikTok’s US operations to domestic firms has heightened privacy concerns by shifting “who controls and can compel access to the data, and under what safeguards,” Christiansen said, without fundamentally altering the platform’s data-collection incentives.

Beyond privacy, the sale has raised new national security questions. TikTok US is now jointly controlled by private equity firm Silver Lake, software giant Oracle, and Emirati investment firm MGX, each holding a 15% stake. Critics have pointed out that it merely transfers control to US corporations politically aligned with the current administration in a system where the likes of Meta, Google and Amazon have used surveillance and algorithms to “influence what we think, do, and consume,” Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a DC-based NGO, argued.

US TikTok users are already accusing the platform of increased censorship of pro-Palestinian content. Days after the sale, Palestinian journalist Bisan Owda, who had 1.4 million followers on TikTok, said her account had been banned.

“National security isn’t only about where data sits or who owns the shares — it’s also about the recommendation system,” Christiansen said. “When a platform can shape attention and belief at scale, algorithm governance becomes a security and fundamental-rights issue alongside data governance.”