Vietnam bans posting fake news online

Yes, and he has since died. The Chinese government has also expressed its displeasure on how that was handled, is now treating that man as a hero of the nation, and has forced the police to offer their apologies to the grieving family, leading to disciplinary action against one or more police officers involved.

While Vietnam definitely has some issues about freedom of the press and so on,

At the moment they do seem to be not suppressing Coronavirus news from legit sources or hiding whats going on. They have actually been quite open with case numbers, every case out in the wild there is a list of where they have been and so on in the papers, text messages and the usual social media apps like zalo with reports to contact the government., it seems they are relying on this information helping them to quarantine and track down potentially infected as they're quite aggressive in quarantining an area if they think there is risk.

Also sent to corrections, Vietnam started its lockdown on 1st April at midnight.

Re: Why

I'm not sure we should be taking advice on safety, news or anything else, from somebody with such terrible grammar and spelling.

Re: Late to the party?

"Everyone says that the 1973 award is the “most unpopular” Nobel award ever, and that is probably true. But the nature of the unpopularity is worth pondering. The critics mainly objected to the half of the prize going to Kissinger, not the half going to Le Duc Tho. They thought it outrageous that the American secretary of state had won the Nobel prize, not so much that the representative of a totalitarian and mass-murdering dictatorship had done so. It is legend that Tom Lehrer, the American musician-satirist, gave up his career after Kissinger won the peace prize. That is not true: He had bowed out before. But he did say that “political satire became obsolete” when Kissinger won."

-Jay Nordlinger

faulty reasoning...

... in my experience most people don't recognize faulty reasoning if it bites them on the arse.

I think if you are very clear about what false news actually is, it tends to avoid the creation of a slippery slope. For instance, in the UK it is specifically illegal to claim something is a cure for cancer (Cancer Act, 1939) and very few people, mostly utter fruitcakes who forgot what Bob Marley died of, think this is being used to surpress real information.

I think there's a big difference in using emergency powers you have because of the pandemic to create pandemic-specific powers and some of the more frightening stuff people like Orban are doing, which seems to be a thinly disguised power grab.