Vietnam Party Seeks Influencers, AI Experts for Modern Propaganda Push

Vietnam’s Communist Party is trying to make propaganda look less like propaganda and more like the internet itself. Internal planning documents reviewed by Reuters show a push to recruit at least 1,000 social-media influencers and 5,000 artificial-intelligence experts by 2030, alongside podcasts and targeted digital content.

The strategy reflects a blunt recognition in Hanoi: younger Vietnamese increasingly get news and commentary online, not from official speeches or state posters. Party planners say the goal is to build ideological immunity against harmful, toxic and false information, but the machinery behind that language is built around tighter message control, not open debate. By leaning on creators who already know how to work platform algorithms, the party is seeking to package official narratives in forms that feel familiar, informal and shareable.

Vietnam already has the digital reach to make that effort consequential. DataReportal said the country had 79.8 million internet users in early 2025 and 127 million active mobile connections, equal to 126% of the population. Facebook remains Vietnam’s most popular online platform and a major channel for circulating news and information, while Zalo is also widely used.

The country’s information space is already heavily managed. Reporters Without Borders says the army-developed Force 47 has 10,000 cyber-soldiers, alongside the broader Steering Committee 35 network, both part of the state’s online influence and monitoring apparatus. The same group says Vietnam’s 2019 Cybersecurity Law requires platforms to store user data in Vietnam and hand it over to authorities when required.

That legal and technical pressure may deepen further. Vietnam’s National Assembly passed a new Law on Cybersecurity on December 10, 2025, with implementation scheduled for July 1, 2026, according to legal summaries. The law would consolidate earlier cyber rules and give the state another tool to shape the online environment just as the party expands its own digital messaging arm.

The effort also comes under To Lam, who became general secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam in August 2024 after Nguyen Phu Trong’s long tenure. Press-freedom advocates say he has continued a hard line against dissent, making the propaganda overhaul look less like a communications refresh than a modernization of authoritarian control. In practice, the party is moving from banners and broadcast slogans to influencer culture, machine-assisted targeting and platform-native storytelling, a shift that could make official messaging harder to distinguish from the organic content people scroll past every day.