Cyberspace is a “special environment” for connection and information sharing on a global scale; on the one hand, it brings benefits and positive changes to many fields of social life, but on the other hand, it poses a lot of threats in different ways. That users could post and share information in a free, unlimited way on the Internet makes this place a “fertile” land for hostile forces to step up their propaganda campaigns aimed at sabotaging our Party and nation’s revolutionary cause. For this reason, it is necessary to further research and propose measures for improving the effectiveness of the fight against “peaceful evolution” in cyberspace both theoretically and practically.

The true purpose of the “peaceful evolution” strategy boosted by hostile forces in Viet Nam is to sabotage our Party and State and step by step topple the political regime in our country. To that end, they use a combination of activities aimed at influencing opinion and action of the masses, particularly the youth, making those people pursue trivial things and stay away from the revolutionary ideal, causing “self-evolution” and “self-transformation” within our society. One of the most common artifices used by hostile forces is to take advantage of cyberspace to release articles, images, and videos of deliberate distortion and incitement.

In recent years, there have been a large number of articles against Vietnamese revolution in cyberspace. According to statistics by Steering Board 35 of the Central Military Commission, in the first half of 2023, on a monthly basis, tens of thousands of articles containing negative, distorted information in cyberspace were produced with tens of millions of comments and shares. When we search sensitive topics of public concern online, millions of results will appear. The first five results will include dozens of negative articles from online websites, such as VOA, BBC, RFA, and Tieng Dan Newspaper. Articles with negative information on websites, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram are posted by various user accounts; their sabotage contents are very flexible and approached from different angles. Those articles do not have clear titles; they refer to bad things or inequalities in daily life from which a lot of negative questions will be raised by readers and viewers. For this reason, those articles are quickly spread and receive a large number of interactions.

Being fully aware of those challenges, over the years, our Party and State have implemented various measures to prevent bad information, safeguard the Party’s ideological foundation, combat “peaceful evolution” within all forms of communication, particularly in cyberspace, thereby creating a deep and wide campaign with the participation of many people and producing positive outcome. However, in the process, several weaknesses still exist as follows. (1). The number of press agencies with a specialised column is small, most of them are from the armed forces. (2). The rate of comments and shares for this type of articles is still low, from about 2% to 4%. (3). There are not many “channels” of information, the main form is text on websites or Facebook, and there are a few videos on YouTube. Facebook Fanpages created by units attract interactions mainly from their staff members, thus earning limited outcomes. In order to improve  the effectiveness of the fight against “peaceful evolution”  in cyberspace, within this article, we put forward some fundamental measures as follows.

First, synchronously building a force in charge of managing and writing articles of combat in a routine, continuous way. As the fight against “peaceful evolution” takes place in all areas, it is necessary to build a network of collaborators, especially in the fields which are severely sabotaged by hostile forces. Priority should be given to taking political profiles of collaborators into consideration; those people must be capable of exploiting information and writing articles of combat in various fields. Significance should be attached to building a core force of scientists and journalists who are able to write articles promptly. Emphasis should be placed on building strong steering boards with capabilities in situation forecasting, organisation, and command, while attention should be paid to holding training courses to improve this force’s skills in direction, collaboration, and Internet use. In the process, it is essential to opportunely give directions on the issues of direct struggle, issues of reconfirmation and defence, and approaches to sensitive issues. Due regard should be paid to identifying components of the force in charge of “peaceful evolution” combat, allocating responsibilities, developing methods of administration uniformly and regulations on information security, and protecting the force in charge of struggle. At the same time, it is necessary to organise an axis of struggle on a national scale in line with the particularities of each unit.

Second, completing technical standards of articles about the fight against “peaceful evolution” on the Internet. There is a fact that the Internet is a huge stock of information enabling its users to search and share in the most effective way. To handle those sources of information, Internet service providers, such as Google, Bing, ALO, Ask.com, and Yahoo have developed the Search Engine Optimisation tool (SEO). Therefore, to improve the search and sharing of information, articles should achieve SEO standards. Titles of those articles should be in lower case, not more than 70 characters; abstracts should be less than 150 characters; images should have good quality without copyright infringement and include logos of the units that release those articles; contents should be clearly divided into parts with subtitles less than 250 characters. Besides, selecting key words in accordance with Internet users’ taste is very important; the higher key word density is, the more effective searching becomes; key words should appear in main titles, abstracts, subtitles, contents, and image captions. Links with other relevant articles should be created to explain connotations and issues.

Furthermore, in the building of websites, it is necessary to use short domain names, with priority given to international ones (level 1), such as: .com, .net, .info, and .gov; national ones (level 2), such as: .vn, .au, and .uk; and others (level 3), such as: .edu.vn, .gov.vn, and .edu.uk, respectively. In fact, it is easy to find huongsenviet.com and nhanvanviet.com as they have international domain names. Meanwhile, it is difficult to find websites with level 3 domain names like blogspot.com. Facebook accounts used for the fight should have profile avatars and adequate necessary information as requested by Internet providers in order to increase interactions and facilitate access to the public.

Third, building a system of articles and programmes of combat according to chains of events to avoid interruption. Difficulties in writing an article of combat lie in the selection of proper topics with clear arguments to avoid “propaganda in favour of hostile forces”; therefore, the number of those articles is limited. Moreover, there are some good, highly persuasive articles, but they are posted in newspapers or magazines of low credit. To deal with that problem, there should be 3 lines of articles; the first line should include high-quality articles by scientists against hostile forces’ issues of sabotage. Those articles should have in-depth theories, reflect and explain realities, and achieve a consensus on and uniformed positive approaches to issues or events so as to directly orientate readers’ standpoint and ideology against wrong, hostile information. The second line should be comprised of short articles (from 800 to 1,000 words) that are quickly produced in specific areas. The third one should consist of comments, images, and short videos which are centred on spreading “good people, good deed” examples, humanitarian activities, creative models for communities against hostile forces’ arguments. Those products should be rapidly developed on mobile devices. Articles from the first and second lines should meet SEO standards which are not necessary to be applied to the third one; however, products from the third line should be in the most flexible and timely fashion. At the same time, based on national historical events and our Party and State’s yearly work plans, press agencies should make forecasts about hostile forces’ sabotage and then their own plans of combat properly. Articles from the first line should be created mainly by renowned scientists, researchers, and journalists, while articles and products from the second and third ones could be developed by all possible forces within offices and units. Additionally, there should be decentralisation of management of articles, financial support for articles, and regulations that allow authors to send their articles to all editorial boards. It is essential to give directions on developing good-quality articles published by the lower lines. Noticeably, there should be better mechanisms as producing videos currently encounters difficulties in cost, time, and personnel.

Fourth, increasing the number of articles and posting density to improve the effectiveness of the fight against "peaceful evolution". We have a lot of in-depth, high-quality articles created by journalists, scientists, and collaborators who are dedicated themselves to the revolutionary cause; it is  a tremendous waste if we do not spread those products amongst readers. Therefore, press agencies, particularly the main ones should keep maintaining the column named “Events and Commentary” to publish articles from the first line. Besides, press management agencies should assign newspapers and magazines with a high rate of interactions to re-publish articles from the first line on their appropriate columns. Units taking part in the fight against “peaceful evolution” should upgrade their website domain names to levels 1 and 2 to publish articles written by their own staff members. Articles and videos from the third line should be published on social networks like Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, and Telegram. Those products from the third line will receive a huge number of interactions and comments, including both positive and negative ones. Besides, since hostile forces’ sabotage is characterised by the recurrence of a same issue at different times, a part from new articles of combat, it is necessary to enable the re-posting of old articles to help readers with a more general view of the old issue that is being raised at present.

In addition to those above-mentioned measures, there should be mechanisms to strictly punish those who post false information or spread distortions. At the same time, it is necessary to step up technical solutions to make situational assessments, facilitate statistics, monitor, prevent, and even eliminate accounts with a lot of bad information in order to clean cyberspace, back official, true information, and cement the masses’ faith in our Party, State, and people’s revolutionary cause.

Col. NGUYEN HUU NGOC, MA., National Defence Journal