Hanoi - Vietnamese authorities are looking into a number of fake weblogs purporting to be the thoughts and messages of top Communist Party and government officials, a spokesman said Thursday. The latest faux blog, in the name of Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung, has posted dozens of entries since July 29 - mostly extolling the virtues of the Communist Party, criticizing several jailed dissidents by name and even writing a short poem urging loyalty to the late communist independence leader Ho Chi Minh.
However, other blogs - supposedly written by the Communist Party's general secretary, Nong Duc Manh, and official head of state President Nguyen Minh Triet - feature veiled criticisms of one-party rule and state censorship.
All of the blogs are fakes, a spokesman for the prime minister said Thursday, although he conceded he had no idea who might be impersonating the officials or for what purpose
"The prime minister does not blog. None of the leaders of the state or party has a blog," said Dung's spokesman, Nguyen Kinh Quoc. "We can't tell who is doing this. But we can confirm these are imposters."
Quoc said that the government administrative office is investigating who might be behind the fakes, which are all registered on "360.yahoo.com," the blog-hosting site of Yahoo!
"We are reading and looking into the entries' contents. So far, there's nothing serious about the entries," Quoc said.
He added that he has contacted the prime minister, currently on a tour of Southeast Asian countries, and asked his advice about how to handle the situation.
Vietnam has an internet firewall that blocks pornography and political websites, including those of overseas Vietnamese groups opposed to Communist rule. However, as of Thursday afternoon, the fake blogs had not been blocked.
All three of the fakes are written in a style typical to Vietnamese government officials, and most postings echo the official party line of loyalty to the state and the Communist Party.
However, some entries indicate the real writers might actually be opponents of one-party rule, either inside or outside Vietnam.
One posting from "Nong Duc Manh" addressing corruption states that "Corruption is the desire of Vietnamese officials." And "Nguyen Minh Triet" on July 6 wrote an entry criticizing state media for "not reporting the truth" of a month-long land-rights protest of hundreds of people in Ho Chi Minh City last month.
That protest was supported by overseas Vietnamese groups calling for political change in Vietnam, and also by internal critics of the government, including dissident Buddhist monk Thich Quang Do, who defied a house arrest order to go to the demonstration and urge those with complaints of seized land to also demand multi-party elections.
Vietnam has an estimated 3 million bloggers, and the government has been talking about how to better control content, which is mostly based on foreign hosting sites like Yahoo!
Vu Xuan Thanh, the chief inspector of the Ministry of Culture, said that if the imposters are identified, they should be punished.
"Faking the identity of a highest leader of the government will result in harsh punishment," Thanh said Thursday. "This is a serious and dangerous case."
The Communist Party has been taking pains to reach out to a young and newly internet-savvy population recently, with both Dung and Triet hosting online chats viewed by at least 1 million people.
At the same time, though, the government has cracked down on open dissent, sentencing nearly a dozen dissidents to prison this year for "spreading propaganda against the Socialist Republic."
Opponents of the government overseas and in Vietnam have been peppering email inboxes for the past year with mass e-mails critical of the Communist Party and calling for democratic elections.
