VIETNAMESE Prime Minister, Nguyen Xuan Phuc said the biggest threat to the country's development was the reluctance to take action and the fear of responsibility.
Speaking to the National Assembly, the Vietnam News reported Xuan Phuc as saying that eradicating poverty was hard enough, but making the nation prosperous and stable while catching up with other developed countries was harder.
He also reiterated the difficulties and hurdles on the way to Vietnam becoming a developed, industrialised country by the middle of the century.
According to Vietnam News, Phuc said Vietnam's key driving force for growth and development was no longer natural resources, but the population of nearly 100 million people.
“Our political system is committed to take care of every single one so that none are left behind," he said.
Meanwhile, Vietnam's Minister of Information and Communications Nguyen Manh Hung told the National Assembly that Vietnamese-made social networks hope to get 90 million users by the end of 2020.
He said the ambitious number was based on the country’s population of 96.2 million this year.
Hung said he had since set up a task force to support made in Vietnam social networks as soon as he took office last year and aimed to attract as many users as those of foreign platforms in Vietnam, most notably, Facebook.
“After a year, Vietnamese social networks have gained growth of 30 per cent with some 65 million users,” the minister said.
Three new domestic social networks, namely Lotus, Gapo and Hahalolo, were introduced within months in 2019, joining the race to attract users against other Vietnamese networks Zalo and Mocha as well as foreign players like Facebook and Google.
Those international platforms generated about 90 million users in Vietnam a month, he said.
The US social network Facebook had the biggest share of the pie with between 60 and 65 million active users monthly, according to the company.
Hung, however, said the Government did not aim to replace foreign social networks with domestic ones.
“Vietnam has integrated and opened for investment. But to do business anyone in Vietnam must abide by Vietnamese law and make Vietnam more prosperous. Foreign social networks can exist alongside domestic ones if they follow Vietnamese law,” he said.
He also said that the Government’s push to switch netizens to domestic social networks is part of its efforts to tackle the fake news epidemic.
Hùng said other countries had already made laws to address misinformation, for example Singapore where those responsible for spreading fake news are subject to fines of millions of dollars and jail terms.
He said the ministry was working on ways to identify users of social networks, and would require foreign social networks to provide their users’ information upon request as regulated in the recently-adopted cybersecurity law.
The long-term solution to battle misinformation, he added would be to educate citizens on how to distinguish between real and fake news.