January 2019 - Page 12 of 16

Building Boom Turning to Bust as Turkey’s Economy Slows

01/10/2019 by WPbiz Leave a Comment

Deep in a provincial region of northwestern Turkey, it looks like a mirage — hundreds of luxury houses built in neat rows, their pointed towers somewhere between French chateau and Disney castle.

Meant to provide luxurious accommodations for foreign buyers, the houses are however standing empty in what is anything but a fairy tale for their investors.

The ambitious development has been hit by regional turmoil as well as the slump in the Turkish construction industry — a key sector — as the country’s economy heads towards what could be a hard landing in an intensifying downturn.

After a long period of solid growth, Turkey’s economy contracted 1.1 percent in the third quarter, and many economists expect it will enter into recession this year.

The country has been hit by high inflation and a currency crisis in August. The lira lost 28 percent of its value against the dollar in 2018 and markets are still unconvinced by the readiness of the government under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to tackle underlying economic issues.

The villas close to the town center of Mudurnu in the Bolu region are intended to resemble European architecture and are part of the Sarot Group’s Burj Al Babas project.

But the development of 732 villas and a shopping center — which began in 2014 — is now in limbo as Sarot Group has sought bankruptcy protection.

It is one of hundreds of Turkish companies that have done so as they seek cover from creditors and to restructure their debts.

Driving force

Sarot Group filed for bankruptcy protection after some of their Gulf customers could not pay for the villas they had bought as part of the $200 million (175 million euros) project, Sarot’s deputy chairman, Mezher Yerdelen, said.

So far, $100 million has been spent on the project.

“Some of the sales had to be cancelled,” Yerdelen told AFP, after the company sold 351 villas to Arab investors.

The villas are worth between $400,000 and $500,000 each. They were designed with the Gulf buyers in mind, architect Yalcin Kocacalikoglu said.

While the drop in oil prices hurt its Gulf customers, Sarot Group was also hit by “the negative impact of the economic fluctuations on construction costs” in Turkey, Yerdelen said.

Despite a legal battle over its bankruptcy status, Yerdelen said the company can continue making sales and that he hopes the project will be inaugurated in October 2019.

Yet the Al Babas project is hardly alone. Unfinished and empty housing projects are strewn across the country, testimony to the trouble the construction sector, and the wider economy, now finds itself in.

The construction sector has been a driving force of the Turkish economy under Erdogan, who has overseen growth consistently above the global average since he came to power in 2003.

But the sector contracted 5.3 percent on-year in the third quarter of 2018.

“Three out of four companies seeking bankruptcy protection or bankruptcy are construction companies,” said Alper Duman, associate professor at Izmir University of Economics.

Turkey’s ‘locomotive’

“Whether we call it a construction bubble or a housing bubble, there is a bubble in Turkey,” he said.

He pointed to unsold housing stock as the main indicator of this, with data showing in that over the past 16 years 10.5 million apartments have been built but only eight million have been approved for use.

“There is a high risk this bubble will burst,” he said.

Trade Minister Ruhsar Pekcan said in mid-December that 846 companies had applied for bankruptcy protection since March 2018 but opposition daily Sozcu claimed in October the figure was more than 3,000.

Turkish Chamber of Civil Engineers head Cemal Gokce expressed pessimism, predicting “more bankruptcy protection applications, bankruptcies” among construction companies.

He said too many homes have been built in Turkey.

And most are not luxury villas like Burj Al Babas with its style reminiscent of the Sleeping Beauty Castle at Disney theme parks, but simple apartments and homes for ordinary Turks.

The construction confidence index of the Turkish Statistical Institute (TurkStat) fell 2.1 percent in December to 55.4, after 56.6 in the previous month. Anything below 100 indicates a pessimistic outlook.

However, Kerim Alain Bertrand, who previously headed up a firm that provided and analyzed data on Turkey’s real estate market, said recently he was more optimistic, partly due to the country’s growing population.

“The construction sector is this country’s locomotive sector,” he said.

While there will be a consolidation in the sector, it will “continue to be kept alive” by the young population, he added.

The median age of the population in Turkey was 31.7 in 2017, according to TurkStat, compared to 42.8 in the European Union.
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Study: Elderly, Conservatives Shared More Facebook Fakery in 2016

01/10/2019 by WPit Leave a Comment

People over 65 and ultraconservatives shared about seven times more fake information masquerading as news on Facebook than younger adults, moderates and super liberals during the 2016 election season, a new study found.

The first major study to look at who is sharing links from debunked sites found that not many people were doing it. On average, only 8.5 percent of those studied — about 1 person out of 12 — shared false information during the 2016 campaign, according to the study in Wednesday’s issue of the journal Science Advances. But those doing it tended to be older and more conservative.

“For something to be viral, you’ve got to know who shares it,” said study co-author Jonathan Nagler, a politics professor and co-director of the Social Media and Political Participation Lab at New York University. “Wow, old people are much more likely than young people to do this.”

Battling back

Facebook and other social media companies were caught off guard in 2016 when Russian agents exploited their platforms to meddle with the U.S. presidential election by spreading fake news, impersonating Americans and running targeted advertisements to try to sway votes. Since then, the companies have thrown millions of dollars and thousands of people into fighting false information.

Researchers at Princeton University and NYU in 2016 interviewed 2,711 people who used Facebook. Of those, nearly half agreed to share all their postings with the professors.

The researchers used three different lists of false information sites — one compiled by BuzzFeed and two others from academic research teams — and counted how often people shared from those sites. Then to double check, they looked at 897 specific articles that had been found false by fact checkers and saw how often those were spread.

All those lists showed similar trends.

When other demographic factors and overall posting tendencies are factored in, the average person older than 65 shared seven times more false information than those between 18 and 29. The seniors shared more than twice as many fake stories as people between 45 and 64 and more than three times that of people in the 30-to-44-year-old range, said lead study author Andrew Guess, a politics professor at Princeton.

The simplest theory for why older people share more false information is a lack of “digital literacy,” said study co-author Joshua Tucker, also co-director of the NYU social media political lab. Senior citizens may not tell truth from lies on social networks as easily as others, the researchers said.

Signaling identity

Harvard public policy and communication professor Matthew Baum, who was not part of the study but praised it, said he thought sharing false information was “less about beliefs in the facts of a story than about signaling one’s partisan identity.” That’s why efforts to correct fakery don’t really change attitudes and one reason why few people share false information, he said.

When other demographics and posting practices are factored in, people who called themselves very conservative shared the most false information, a bit more than those who identified themselves as conservative. The very conservatives shared misinformation 6.8 times more often than the very liberals and 6.7 times more than moderates. People who called themselves liberals essentially shared no fake stories, Guess said.

Nagler said he was not surprised that conservatives in 2016 shared more fake information, but he and his colleagues said that did not necessarily mean that conservatives are by nature more gullible when it comes to false stories. It could simply reflect that there was much more pro-Donald Trump and anti-Hillary Clinton false information in circulation in 2016 that it drove the numbers for sharing, they said.

However, Baum said in an email that conservatives post more false information because they tend to be more extreme, with less ideological variation than their liberal counterparts and they take their lead from Trump, who “advocates, supports, shares and produces fake news/misinformation on a regular basis.”

The researchers looked at differences in gender, race and income but could not find any statistically significant differences in sharing of false information.

Improvements

After much criticism, Facebook made changes to fight false information, including de-emphasizing proven false stories in people’s feeds so others were less likely to see them. It seems to be working, Guess said. Facebook officials declined to comment.

“I think if we were to run this study again, we might not get the same results,” Guess said.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Deb Roy, a former Twitter chief media scientist, said the problem is that the American news diet is “full of balkanized narratives” with people seeking information that they agree with and calling true news that they don’t agree with fake.

“What a mess,” Roy said.
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Sundance Adds Documentary About Alleged Jackson Abuse

01/09/2019 by WPart Leave a Comment

A documentary film about two boys who accused Michael Jackson of sexual abuse is set to premiere at the Sundance Film Festival this month.

The Sundance Institute announced the addition of Leaving Neverland and The Brink, a documentary about Steve Bannon, to its 2019 lineup on Wednesday.

A description of Leaving Neverland says it will tell the story of two men who are now in their 30s and began long-running relationships with Jackson at ages 7 and 10 when Jackson was at the height of his fame. The names of the Jackson accusers profiled in the documentary were not released. Jackson was acquitted of molestation charges in 2005.

The film is produced and directed by BAFTA-winning director Dan Reed.

The Sundance Film Festival kicks off Jan. 24 and runs through Feb. 4.
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Board Game ‘Who’s She?’ Spotlights Famous Women in History

01/09/2019 by WPart Leave a Comment

Did she win a Nobel Prize? Was she an inventor? Did she make a discovery?

These are some of the questions that Polish designer Zuzanna Kozerska-Girard wants more children to ask as they learn about famous women while playing her debut board game Who’s She?

“We basically don’t know their stories. We don’t know enough about women who have done amazing stuff,” Kozerska-Girard, founder of game company Playeress, said in a Skype interview.

Similar to the classic game Guess Who?, two players are each given a biography card of a famous woman and must ask each other questions until her identity is answered correctly — be it French spy Josephine Baker or Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai.

“The game is for girls as much as it is for boys. They need to see powerful women around them and see them as their heroes,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation from Poland.

More recognition

The game is being sold at a time when the achievements of women — scientists, politicians, campaigners and artists — are increasingly being recognized online and in public spaces.

Kozerska said she designed the game, which costs 75 euros ($86), because she wanted children to know that women of all nationalities were as capable as men in any profession.

“If you’re a girl who’s 3 years old and you see men everywhere in positions with more power, you’ll just think that that’s the way it is,” said Kozerska-Girard. “I think it’s important to bring this [gender gap] up with kids — and the simple way to do this is by playing games.”

Since Who’s She? launched in November on crowdfunding site Kickstarter, Kozerska-Girard has sold more than 6,000 units and received 500,000 euros to produce the game, which she makes by hand out of wood.

Wikipedia gap

Volunteers are working to raise the profile of famous women — who make up only 17 percent of Wikipedia’s 1.5 million biographies, according to the Wikimedia Foundation, which hosts the online encyclopedia — by writing more female biographies.

In Britain, a statue of 19th-century feminist Millicent Fawcett was unveiled last April in London’s Parliament Square, the first monument to honor a woman in a space previously occupied by 11 statues of men.

The statue was the result of a campaign by feminist Caroline Criado-Perez, who said there were more statues in Britain of men called John than statues of women. Excluding Queen Victoria, less than 3 percent of statues represented women, she said.

In August, a group of Belgian activists stuck up unofficial street names in the capital, Brussels, to commemorate women and also pushed for new public spaces to reflect their role — a phenomenon also seen in the Netherlands.
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Experimental App Might Spot Drug Overdoses in Time to Help

01/09/2019 by WPit Leave a Comment

Too often people die of an opioid overdose because no one is around to notice they’re in trouble. Now scientists are creating a smartphone app that beams sound waves to measure breathing — and summon help if it stops.

The app is still experimental. But in a novel test, the Second Chance app detected early signs of overdose in the critical minutes after people injected heroin or other illegal drugs, researchers reported Wednesday.

One question is whether most drug users would pull out their phone and switch on an app before shooting up. The University of Washington research team contends it could offer a much-needed tool for people who haven’t yet found addiction treatment.

“They’re not trying to kill themselves — they’re addicted to these drugs. They have an incentive to be safe,” said Shyamnath Gollakota, an engineering and computer science associate professor whose lab turns regular cellphones into temporary sonar devices.

But an emergency room physician who regularly cares for overdose patients wonders how many people would try such a device.

“This is an innovative way to attack the problem,” said Dr. Zachary Dezman of the University of Maryland School of Medicine, who wasn’t involved in the research.

Still, “I don’t know if many folks who use substances are going to have the forethought to prepare,” he added.

More than 47,000 people in the U.S. died of opioid overdoses in 2017. The drugs suppress breathing but a medicine called naloxone can save victims — if it reaches them in time. Usually, that means someone has to witness the collapse. Dr. Jacob Sunshine, a University of Washington anesthesiologist, notes that people have died with a relative in the next room unaware they were in trouble.

How it works

The research team settled on cellphones as potential overdose monitors because just about everyone owns one. They designed an app that measures how someone’s chest rises and falls to see if they’re slipping into the slow, shallow breaths of an overdose or stop breathing completely.

How? The software converts the phone’s built-in speaker and microphone to send out inaudible sound waves and record how they bounce back. Analyzing the signals shows specific breathing patterns.

It won’t work inside a pocket, and people would have to stay within 3 feet. The researchers are in the process of making the app capable of dialing for help if a possible overdose is detected.

Testing the device

They put the experimental gadget to the test at North America’s first supervised injection site in Vancouver, British Columbia, where people are allowed to bring in illegal drugs and inject themselves under medical supervision in case of overdose. Study participants agreed to have doctoral student Rajalakshmi Nandakumar place the app-running cellphone nearby during their regularly monitored visit.

The software correctly identified breathing problems that could signal an overdose — seven or fewer breaths a minute, or pauses in breathing — 90 percent of the time, the researchers found. Most were near-misses; two of the 94 study participants had to be resuscitated.

For a bigger test, the researchers next turned to people who don’t abuse drugs but were about to receive anesthesia for elective surgery. Rendering someone unconscious for an operation mimics how an overdose shuts down breathing.

Measuring 30 seconds of slowed or absent breathing as those patients went under, the app correctly predicted 19 of 20 simulated overdoses, the researchers reported. The one missed case was a patient breathing slightly faster than the app’s cutoff.

The findings were reported in the journal Science Translational Medicine. The researchers have patented the invention and plan to seek Food and Drug Administration approval.
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Gems in Teeth Hailed as Proof That Women More Widely Involved in Medieval Texts

01/09/2019 by WPart Leave a Comment

The discovery of semi-precious gems in the teeth of a 1,000-year-old female skeleton proved women were more widely involved in creating medieval manuscripts than previously thought, a group of international historians said on Wednesday.

A study by German-based Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and Britain’s University of York found traces of lapis lazuli – which was used as a blue pigment in painting – in the dental plaque of a woman buried between 1000-1200 AD.

The skeleton was unearthed in a cemetery associated with a women’s monastery in Dalheim in western Germany.

The researchers said this challenged long-held beliefs that women had played little role in the European Middle Ages in producing literary and written texts which came largely from religious institutions.

Researcher Christina Warinner from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History said this finding from the 11th century was unprecedented in showing more women were literate, educated and encouraged to read at that time.

“I am excited that our study shows that the use of archaeology might have the tools to recover some of the lost information (about women in the past),” Warinner told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone.

“We have this view there was only a handful of extraordinary women in the past that seemed to be different from everyone else but I think that more were involved than we give credit for.”

The team studying the skeleton concluded that the woman, who was aged 45-60, must have been a painter who frequently licked the end of the brush whilst painting.

Warinner said the woman was thought to be part of a group of about 14 women living at the monastery who were likely to have been wealthy, upper class, and educated.

“Here we have direct evidence of a woman, not just painting, but painting with a very rare and expensive pigment,” she said.

“This woman’s story could have remained hidden forever without the use of these techniques. It makes me wonder how many other artists we might find in medieval cemeteries – if we only look.”
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Britain Will no Longer be Bound by EU Sanctions After Brexit

01/09/2019 by WPbiz Leave a Comment

With the March deadline approaching for Britain to depart the European Union, there are concerns that Britain’s exit could undermine Western sanctions against countries like Iran, Syria and North Korea. Analysts note that Britain has been influential in persuading the EU to take action, saying there are risks Britain will seek a different path as it carves out new economic and strategic partnerships.

“Some estimates hold that up to 80 percent of the EU’s sanctions that are in place have been put forward or suggested by the UK,” said Erica Moret, chair of the Geneva International Sanctions Network.

She says Britain’s future absence from EU meetings will impact the bloc’s future relations. “The UK is also a very important player of course as a leading economic and political power, a soft power player in the world. Also the City of London means that financial sanctions are rendered much stronger through the UK’s participation.”

Britain was quick to coordinate expulsions of Russian diplomats among EU allies following the nerve agent attack in the city of Salisbury last year against a former double agent, an incident London blamed on Moscow.

Through EU membership, Britain enforces common sanctions against several other states and individuals, such as Syrian officials accused of war crimes.

After the Brexit deadline day on March 29, Britain will be free to implement its own sanctions.

“I wouldn’t see this happening in the short term, especially because again both sides have said they are committed to EU sanctions and they are also committed to projecting some political values that both EU and UK agree to,” says Anna Nadibaidze of the policy group Open Europe.

Britain, however, could seek a competitive advantage over Europe by diverging its sanctions policy, says Moret.

“It’s very unlikely that the UK would deliberately seek to gain commercial advantage over EU partners. But when you think about the tensions that will come into play post-Brexit, when it comes down to trying to negotiate new trade deals, seeking new foreign investment into the country. There will be pressure, a balance to be made between alignment with EU sanctions and domestic interests.”

That pressure could be felt first over Iran. Alongside European allies, Britain backs the 2015 Iran nuclear deal known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA, which lifted some Western sanctions on Tehran in return for a suspension of its atomic enrichment program. U.S. President Donald Trump pulled out of the deal last year, saying Iran has violated the spirit of the agreement.

Britain urgently wants a trade deal with the United States after Brexit. Will the price be alignment with Washington’s policy on Iran?

“That is a key risk and it’s a very important one that will be in the forefront of policymakers’ minds,” adds Moret.

Britain was among EU nations backing sanctions against an Iranian intelligence unit this week, accusing Tehran of plotting attacks and assassinations in Europe. Both Brussels and London say they will continue to work together to counter common threats through a range of policy tools including sanctions.

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CES: Transportation Secretary Skips Show Amid Government Shutdown

01/09/2019 by WPit Leave a Comment

The CES 2019 gadget show is revving up in Las Vegas. Here are the latest findings and observations from Associated Press reporters on the ground.

THIS SHOW WON’T GO ON

The Trump administration has some ideas about the future of commercial drones and self-driving technology, but it won’t be sharing them at CES this week amid an ongoing partial government shutdown.

CES organizers say U.S. Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao has canceled a planned Wednesday keynote address at the Las Vegas tech conference.

Her decision to skip the event came several days after Ajit Pai, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, and several other scheduled federal government speakers told CES they wouldn’t be coming because of the shutdown.

Chao had planned to speak about U.S. policies affecting drones and self-driving vehicles.

FRESH BREAD, NO BAKER

That smell wafting through the CES show? Freshly baked bread.

Wilkinson Baking Co. unveiled a 22-square-foot machine that can bake 10 loaves of bread every hour — no baker needed. But a human is needed to dump the ingredients into the machine, which then mixes them, forms the dough and starts baking. Someone also needs to slice the bread, although the company says it’s working on a way for the machines to do that, too.

The BreadBot, as it’s called, is being pitched to supermarkets as a way to deliver fresh bread to shoppers who are increasingly worried about the ingredients in their foods. The machine is covered in glass, so customers can watch bread get made. They then select the loaf they want on a touch screen, sort of like a vending machine.

Three local supermarkets are already testing it. The company says a couple of big chains have agreed to try it out soon, but it won’t say which.

SMART BRA

Is your bra dumb? An underwear company is pitching a solution to an age-old problem for women: finding a bra that actually fits.

In the past, women could get help from an expert human in finding their right size. A simple measuring tape wouldn’t do, as it doesn’t reflect other factors such as the shape of a woman’s breasts. But these old-school “bra fitters” are hard to find these days.

To address that, a company called Soma has added some circuits to a brassiere and connected it to an app.

The Soma Innofit has four lines of circuitry hooked up to a circuit board in the back, which then connects to an app via Bluetooth. The smart $59 bra then recommends a bra — from Soma’s line, of course.

The smart bra isn’t meant for regular wearing, though it could be used again if sizes change because of pregnancy or other factors. The company says people who don’t want to buy one can use it at a Soma store.

CASH FOR KIDS

How do you teach children the value of money when there is no cash around?

Pigzbe is offering an electronic cash device with a digital currency called Wollo. It connects to an app that explains how money is earned and spent. Parents can set tasks that children complete to receive Wollo currency.

Trouble comes when your kid tries to spend Wollo at a store. The currency needs to be connected to a card to spend as real money in the real world.

And to get Pigzbe, parents also have to fork out some real money — $99.
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Will Post-Brexit Britain Affect EU Sanctions Against Iran, Others?

01/09/2019 by WPbiz Leave a Comment

Concerns have arisen that European sanctions against countries like Iran, Syria and North Korea could be undermined by Britain’s upcoming departure from the European Union. Britain will be free to implement its own sanctions regime — and while both Brussels and London insist they will continue to work together, analysts say there are risks that Britain will seek a different path as it carves out new economic and strategic partnerships after Brexit. Henry Ridgwell reports from London.
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More Fed Officials Say Caution Is Needed Before More Rate Hikes

01/09/2019 by WPbiz Leave a Comment

Another clutch of U.S. Federal Reserve officials said Wednesday they would be cautious about any further increases in interest rates so that the central bank could assess growing risks to an otherwise solid U.S. economic outlook.

The presidents of three of the 12 Fed regional banks, from Chicago, St. Louis and Atlanta, all pointed to a need for greater clarity on the state of the economy before extending the central bank’s rate hike campaign into a fourth year.

Two of the three, Charles Evans of Chicago and James Bullard of St. Louis, are voting members this year on the Federal Open Market Committee, the bank’s policy-setting panel. Bullard has long been critical of the Fed’s rate increases, begun in December 2015, but the caution from Evans is new, even if he still asserted that rates probably need to rise more.

The remarks from the three come less than a week after Fed Chairman Jerome Powell eased market concerns that policymakers were ignoring signs of an economic slowdown. Powell said he was aware of the risks and would be patient and flexible in policy decisions this year.

The new tone of caution comes after the U.S. stock market dropped precipitously in the fourth quarter of 2018, suffering its worst December performance since the Great Depression. Other signs of tightening financial conditions surfaced as well, including a sharp slowdown in issuance of corporate bonds.

Evans has been among the most vocal backers of gradually tightening U.S. monetary policy. In a speech in Riverwoods, Illinois, his first public comments since November, he nodded to an array of “tough-to-read” factors highlighted by the recent market sell-off, but penciled in a forecast for reasonably good U.S. growth and employment in 2019 and beyond.

His prepared remarks gave no hard timeline for further rate hikes, but they hinted he could agree to stand pat until around midyear to see how factors like global growth and U.S. trade and fiscal policy pan out.

Bullard, meanwhile, told the Wall Street Journal that while the Fed had “a good level of the policy rate today,” there was no rush to push them higher.

Latest hike

The Fed last raised rates in December, to a range of 2.25 percent to 2.50 percent, to conclude a full year of quarterly increases in its benchmark lending rate.

Minutes from that meeting will be released later Wednesday and could shed more light on how policymakers assessed the economy as they agreed to raise rates and, at that time, projected two more increases in 2019.

Overall, that marked the ninth increase of a quarter percentage point since December 2015, when the Fed began lifting interest rates from near zero, where they had been since the financial crisis in 2008.

Defensive decisions

Atlanta Fed President Raphael Bostic, who earlier this week said the Fed was likely to need at most a single rate increase this year, on Wednesday elaborated on that view as driven by conversations with business executives, who say they have become more defensive in preparing for slower growth by paying down debt and holding off on new plans.

Those conversations “are not consistent with the business sector ramping up,” Bostic said in remarks prepared for delivery to the Chattanooga Area Chamber of Commerce. Bostic, who backed all four rate hikes in 2018 as an FOMC voter, does not have a policy vote on the panel this year.

Meanwhile, back in November, Evans had said raising rates to about 3.25 percent would be a “reasonable assumption.” Powell and other top officials in recent weeks have stressed that they are listening to the concerns implied by the stock market sell-off that began in early October, and traders are very skeptical of much more tightening this year.

“A case can be made for a reasonably good 2019 economic outcome,” Evans said. “But I do not want to downplay the risks too much.”
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Vietnam Says Facebook Violated Controversial Cybersecurity Law

01/09/2019 by WPit Leave a Comment

Facebook has violated Vietnam’s new cybersecurity law by allowing users to post anti-government comments on the platform, state media said on Wednesday, days after the controversial legislation took effect in the communist-ruled country.

Despite economic reforms and increasing openness to social change, Vietnam’s Communist Party retains tight media censorship and does not tolerate dissent.

“Facebook had reportedly not responded to a request to remove fan pages provoking activities against the state,” the official Vietnam News Agency said, citing the Ministry of Information and Communication.

In a statement, a Facebook spokeswoman said, “We have a clear process for governments to report illegal content to us, and we review all these requests against our terms of service and local law.”

She did not elaborate.

The ministry said Facebook also allowed personal accounts to upload posts containing “slanderous” content, anti-government sentiment and defamation of individuals and organizations, the agency added.

“This content had been found to seriously violate Vietnam’s Law on cybersecurity” and government regulations on the management, provision and use of internet services, it quoted the ministry as saying.

Global technology companies and rights groups have earlier said the cybersecurity law, which took effect on Jan. 1 and includes requirements for technology firms to set up local offices and store data locally, could undermine development and stifle innovation in Vietnam.

Company officials have privately expressed concerns that the new law could make it easier for the authorities to seize customer data and expose local employees to arrest.

Facebook had refused to provide information on “fraudulent accounts” to Vietnamese security agencies, the agency said in Wednesday’s report.

The information ministry is also considering taxing Facebook for advertising revenue from the platform.

The report cited a market research company as saying $235 million was spent on advertising on Facebook in Vietnam in 2018, but that Facebook was ignoring its tax obligations there.

In November, Vietnam said it wanted half of social media users on domestic social networks by 2020 and plans to prevent “toxic information” on Facebook and Google.
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