The hottest topic of discussion these days is the appearance of an anti-fan group which has posted many entries railing against Huong Giang, a famous actress and singer. The group attracted more than 100,000 posts.

Huong Giang and the police have visited the head of the anti-fan group

Huong Giang became famous after she placed as one of the top 4 at the Vietnam Idol 2012 competition and Miss Queen International 2018. In Vietnam, she is an inspiration for the LGBT community with great successes gained.

Huong Giang and the police have visited the head of the anti-fan group, forcing it to Archive status.

Huong Giang is not the first and the only victim of the defaming and railing on social networks. However, the movement to defame others progressed to ‘full bloom’ when Facebook launched ‘group’, a feature which makes it easier than ever to gather people with the same viewpoints.

Pop singers Bao Thy and Son Tung M-TP were the first celebrities which had anti-fan groups. One YouTube channel railing against Son Tung M-TP was established six years ago with 165,000 subscribers.

With the current policy, which makes it easy to establish groups with no required conditions, the number of groups has been mushrooming in Vietnam.

There are many ‘famous’ anti-fan groups with members. These include the anti-fan group specializing in railing against Gao (real name Vu Phuong Thanh) a writer, with over 140,000 members, and the groups against Pham Huong, Miss Universe Vietnam 2015, with 50,000 members, against singer Chi Pu with 15,000 members, and against the couple of Quang Hai (footballer) and his girlfriend Huynh Anh with 14,000 members.

There is a well known group specializing in disclosing the problems of celebrities, with 280,000 members. Phu*** group has been ‘traced down’ many times, but its members still freely post bad news about celebrities with no evidence or proof.

Meanwhile, Facebook has not controlled content like this.

Since Facebook’s censorship tool is based on AI, it cannot detect the groups of members speaking ill of other people if the members use slang words or abbreviations, such as ‘HHHG’ which means ‘hoa hau Huong Giang’ (Miss Huong Giang), ‘chi X’ (writer with pen name ‘Gao’) and ‘anh toi’ (MC Phan Anh).

So Huong Giang and others who are victims of the defaming on Facebook aren't able to ask the social network to settle the problem.

Instead, celebrities tend to ask for intervention from appropriate local agencies in accordance with the Cybersecurity Law which took effect on January 1, 2019. However, as Nguyen Ngoc Long (Blackmoon), an expert, pointed out, it is not easy to deal with anti-fan groups. 

Phuong Nguyen

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