While China’s Communist Party censorship is being harshly criticized for going from a storm in a teacup to a wider protest movement over the altering of Southern Weekly’s editorial, it turned out that it’s not the only country to be criticized. Vietnam has recently admitted that it hired the bloggers to influence public opinion on the Internet.

Ho Quang Loi, Hanoi’s head of propaganda, admitted that the local government has hundreds of bloggers on its payroll. Overall, there are at least 400 accounts within 20 social media networks. According to the BBC, there’s a significant number of bloggers on the popular Vietnamese social media networks, who post only positive comments and reviews about the country’s communist party. The bloggers are noticed to enthusiastically participate in discussions on the Internet and attack people who are critical of the regime.

Actually, the existence of government sponsored bloggers has long been debated by the western people, but those mostly spend their time arguing on the Internet all day for free. It turned out that this technique isn’t unique to Vietnam or China. A few years ago, for instance, it appeared that the US had also been developing programs to game popular social networks with fake profiles in order to influence discussions and spread propaganda.

The BBC quoted several posts on its own Vietnam page with around 50,000 likes. One of them claimed that such countries as the US must look to their own human rights abuses instead of criticizing other governments. Hanoi’s head of propaganda believes that party bloggers were very useful in shutting down dissent and blocking calls for mass gatherings in the region.