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Having been blocked in Vietnam for a year, Facebook is trying to “friend” the wary Vietnamese government in an attempt to gain better access to one of the world’s fastest-growing online markets. It is advertising for a Hanoi-based “policy and growth manager” who will “lead the company’s interactions with policymakers and will be responsible for ensuring the site’s accessibility.”

The company has no plans to open an office in Vietnam but said that it wanted to hire a contractor to evangelise, or as Facebook puts it, “go round and explain the benefits of Facebook.”The social networking company has already recruited similar envoys in a number of countries where it faced difficulties expanding, including Brazil, India and Russia.

The company said that it wanted someone in Vietnam who could speak the language and talk about Facebook while also “listening and learning” in order to explain the nature of the challenges to HQ and suggest how they might be overcome.

The move raises interesting questions about just how far Facebook will go in moderating its content in order to gain access to a market like Vietnam, where more than a quarter of the 86 million citizens are already online and young people are prepared to fork out several months wages to pick up the latest smart phone.

Facebook already restricts access to certain content in certain countries in order to abide by local laws – Nazi-related material in Austria, France and Germany, for example. The problem in an authoritarian, one-party state like Vietnam is that the law on what citizens can and can’t talk about is very unclear.

Vietnam’s internet service providers began blocking access to Facebook last year, after a number of groups that were highly critical of government policy began attracting significant support on the website.

The government’s official spokesman said in December that “relevant agencies” would “adopt appropriate measures in accordance with the laws” after internet users complained of social networking sites that were “disseminating information against the state” and in contravention of Vietnamese law.

Unlike the so-called Great Firewall of China, Vietnam’s Facebook block is relatively easy to circumvent and the website has been rapidly becoming more popular in Vietnam, with over one million users, according to figures collated by Nick Burcher of ZenithOptimedia in July 2010.

Although the government says that it is keen to support the expansion of the tech and online sectors in Vietnam, its atavistic tendency to censor sends out the wrong message to international investors and budding Vietnamese developers.

Then again, developers could always join the government’s version of Facebook – go.vn – which has all the same features as Facebook (see picture above).

Facebook is hoping that its new Vietnam envoy can give the government a “poke” in the right direction.

Related reading:
Social networks dominate emerging markets, FT
Facebook looks for growth in China and Russia, FT