Vietnam’s Decree 174 Puts Group Admins in the Fine Band

Decree 174 fines unauthorized news pastes on social media from VND 20 million to VND 30 million, about $760 to $1,140. The people in that band are group admins, scrape pages, and anyone who copies a story instead of sending its link.

The government issued Decree 174/2026/ND-CP on 15 May 2026. It took effect on 1 July 2026 and replaced most of the older postal and telecom penalty rules in Decree 15/2020/ND-CP.

The Fine Lands on Group Admins First

The clause that travelled first was unauthorized sharing of press works without the rights holder’s consent. Article 95 of the decree puts that conduct in the same money band as fake news, insults, banned maps, and journalism-style videos shot without a press licence.

The quieter shift is who has to pay when a post stays up. Account holders, channel owners, community page owners, and administrators of community groups can be fined in that same VND 20 million to VND 30 million range if they fail to block or remove illegal content, content that hits another party’s lawful rights, or material that harms children after a competent authority asks them to take it down.

That turns unpaid Facebook and Zalo admins into the enforcement layer. The person who clicked Share is not the only name on the ticket. The person who left the post in a 50,000-member group after a written request is in the band too.

WHO CAN BE FINED UNDER ARTICLE 95

• Paste accounts: Users and pages that copy a press, literary or artistic work, or a publication, without the rights holder’s consent.
• Group admins: Owners of accounts, channels, fan pages and community groups who ignore an official order to remove illegal, rights-harming or child-harming posts.
• Unlicensed reporters: People who use social media to make content in the form of a news report, investigation or journalistic interview without authorisation.
• Press shops: Newsrooms that open an account, page, channel or group on a domestic or foreign platform and fail to notify the authorities as required.
• Serious-content posters: Users who, below the criminal line, distort history, deny revolutionary achievements, or spread false claims that cause public panic, with a higher band of VND 30 million to VND 50 million and a lock on the account, page, group or channel.

Press agencies sit in the rule from both sides. They can demand takedowns of copied stories, and they can be fined themselves if they skip the notice when they open a new social account.

Sharing a Link Stays Legal

On 24 June 2026, Le Quang Tu Do, director of the Authority of Broadcasting and Electronic Information at the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, drew the line the decree itself left fuzzy. A URL is not a journalistic work, he said. It is only a path to one. Point d, clause 1 of Article 95, in the decree’s schedule of administrative fines in telecom and IT, still hits anyone who provides or shares the work without consent, or shares a work that has not been cleared for circulation, or that has been banned or seized.

If users, pages/channels, etc., only share the link to an article on social media, it is not considered a copyright infringement.

Le Quang Tu Do, Director, Authority of Broadcasting and Electronic Information

Tu Do added that a link plus a personal comment, a link dropped into a chat group, or the site’s own share button does not copy the work. Copying part or all of the article beside that link, without the newsroom’s consent, can. Exclusive reporting that only one paper obtained through its own work is more likely to be treated as a rights grab than a fact already running on many desks.

STILL LEGAL ON FACEBOOK AND ZALO

• The share button: Using the official share tool on a news site sends readers to the original page.
• A bare link: Posting only the URL, including in a group chat, is treated as a path, not a copy of the work.
• A link plus a view: Adding a personal comment beside that URL does not, on Tu Do’s reading, republish the article.
• The paper’s traffic: Readers who follow the link land on the newsroom site, which is the outcome the rights clause is built to protect.

Lawyer Truong Thanh Duc, director of ANVI Law and an arbitrator at the Vietnam International Arbitration Centre, said the target is pages that copy stories, photos and video to pull views, sell ads or book revenue. “The thing that is banned is the act of using a press product to profit from other people’s labour and cost. People should not take it that a citizen who only hits the share button on an article can be fined,” he said.

Lawyer Hoang Ha of the Ho Chi Minh City Bar Association warned that writing the source name on a full paste does not make the paste legal. Under intellectual property law, quotation has to stay in a reasonable limit for comment, study or illustration, and it cannot harm the normal use of the original. A credit line on a near-full copy is not a licence.

Early explainers on X repeated that split, then added a harder claim the decree never wrote: that a single share tap could cost tens of millions of dong. The live text is narrower than that panic, and broader in another way, because insults, morals and history sit in the same article as copyright, so an admin who gets a takedown request cannot treat it as a clean rights ticket.

How Large Is a VND 30 Million Penalty?

The old social-media band in Decree 15/2020/ND-CP ran from VND 10 million to VND 20 million and did not spell out a lock on fan pages, groups or channels. Decree 174 lifts the common band to VND 20 million to VND 30 million and adds locks on the higher rung.

Vietnam’s National Statistics Office put workers’ average pay of VND 9.0 million a month in the second quarter of 2026, down VND 53,000 from the Tet-boosted first quarter and up VND 720,000, or 8.7 percent, from a year earlier. For the first half of 2026 the average was also VND 9.0 million, up VND 717,000. Urban workers averaged VND 10.6 million, rural workers VND 7.9 million, men VND 10.1 million and women VND 7.8 million. Salaried staff averaged VND 10.0 million in the first half, up 7.3 percent.

A VND 20 million ticket is 2.2 times that quarterly average wage. A VND 30 million ticket is 3.3 times. Against urban pay, the floor of the band is about 1.9 months of wages.

DECREE 174 SOCIAL MEDIA FINE BANDS

Those amounts are the figures Vietnamese legal briefings and the Authority have been using for the people who use social networks. A separate, higher schedule applies to some posting and hosting conduct outside that social-media article, and it is not the band in the table.

Pages That Rewrite the News

Vietnam already had a long campaign against “bao hoa,” the habit of running a Facebook page or a catch-all site as if it were a newspaper. Decree 174 puts a price on that habit. Using a social network to produce content in the form of a report, an investigation or a journalistic interview, without the proper authorisation, falls in the VND 20 million to VND 30 million band.

So does copying a story and dressing it up as original work. Lawyer Hoang Ha listed the usual tricks: lifting most of the text, swapping a headline, cutting graphics, or reading the article aloud as a video to farm comments. Those are the products that keep a reader inside a fan page instead of on the paper’s site.

The scrape page is the stakeholder the headline missed. It is not a pirate site in another country. It is often a Vietnamese admin who pastes VnExpress or Tuoi Tre into a public group, sells a few ads, and calls the result a news feed. Under Article 95 that paste is a rights violation even if the admin types the paper’s name at the bottom.

Sharing a link to prohibited content is in the same article. So is advertising banned goods. The copyright row is the part that hit family Zalo groups. The rewrite rule is the part that hits the unofficial news industry that grew up around Facebook.

Official Sites Want the Clicks Back

Lawyer Nguyen Van Hau, chairman of the Vietnam Lawyers’ Commercial Arbitration Centre, said the fine-plus-takedown pair is meant to walk readers back to the papers that paid for the reporting.

When violations are penalised and infringing content is required to be removed, readers will seek information from official news websites, helping press agencies maintain traffic and advertising revenue for reinvestment.

Nguyen Van Hau, Chairman, Vietnam Lawyers’ Commercial Arbitration Centre

Lawyer Dang Thi Thuy Huyen of HPL & Partners put the user habit in one line: share the official link instead of pasting the whole article, video or image. That is also the only path Tu Do described as safe.

The rights clause therefore works as a traffic rule. Vietnam’s actual newsstand is Facebook, Zalo, YouTube and TikTok. If the legal copy of a story is the one that lives on the licensed domain, the unofficial page loses the pageview, and the newsroom gets it. Hau said that loop funds the next round of reporting. The cost sits on the scrape page and on the admin who will not pull a flagged post.

That overlay sits on an older licensing stack. Decree 147/2024/ND-CP, issued on 9 November 2024 and in force from 25 December 2024, already required domestic networks that draw 10,000 visits or 1,000 users a month to hold a social-network service licence, with a lighter notice certificate below those lines. Foreign platforms that store data in Vietnam or draw 100,000 visits a month from Vietnam face extra duties if they want livestreaming or revenue tools, including a requirement to verify accounts and lock infringing pages that keep posting illegal content. Decree 174 is the fine table that now backs those duties for the people who actually run the groups.

65 Social Network Licences Were Pulled Before July

The Authority did not wait for 1 July 2026 to lean on platforms. At a half-year review on 24 June 2026, deputy director Nguyen Thi Thanh Huyen said localities had sent in more than 300 violating items in electronic information, nearly 10 times the same stretch of 2025.

THE H1 2026 LICENCE SWEEP

• VND 185 million: Four administrative decisions hit one aggregated information site and three social networks.
• 65 licences: Pulled from 61 organisations that missed reports, no longer met operating conditions, or failed to fix a suspension.
• 94 percent: Share of violating items on Facebook, YouTube and TikTok that the Authority said had been handled in the first half.
• Meta takedowns: 63 accounts, pages and groups plus 2,147 items the Authority said it asked Meta to block, in the first year it also pulled violating Threads posts.

Tu Do used that same briefing to say a link is not a work. The sequence matters. The state was already pulling licences and sending takedown lists to Meta, Google and TikTok. Decree 174 then gave inspectors a higher ticket and a lock button for the admins those platforms host.

By August 2026, commercial accounts were quoting Article 95 in private fights over reputation, a use the copyright briefing never sold. The vagueness problem is real: distortion, public morals and insults are in the same article as a copied news story, and they are the clauses that make a group admin take a government email seriously even when the post is a comment, not a paste.

The share button on a newspaper site still works. The people who now carry the price are the admin who leaves a flagged post up, and the page that pastes the story to keep the click.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does sharing a news link on Facebook or Zalo violate Decree 174?

No. Tu Do based that reading on the definition of a journalistic work in the 2016 Press Law and the 2025 amendment, under which a URL is a path to the work and not the work itself, so a native share, a bare link, or a link with a personal comment is treated as legal distribution rather than a copy.

How much can a social media group admin be fined under Decree 174?

VND 20 million to VND 30 million if the admin fails to block or remove illegal, rights-harming or child-harming content after a competent authority requests it, which means the extra duty in that clause is tied to an official request rather than a standing order to pre-screen every post.

When did Decree 174/2026/ND-CP take effect?

On 1 July 2026, six weeks after the government issued it on 15 May 2026, and it repealed large parts of Decree 15/2020/ND-CP, including the older VND 10 million to VND 20 million social-media band and the absence of an express lock on fan pages, groups and channels.

Does crediting the original newspaper make a full republish legal?

No. Intellectual property law only allows quotation inside a reasonable limit for comment, research or illustration, and a source line on a full-text or near-full paste does not authorise the copy or block a VND 20 million to VND 30 million fine.

What is the difference between Decree 174 and Decree 147?

Decree 147/2024/ND-CP is the licensing and operating rule for social networks, including visit thresholds and takedown duties for platforms, while Decree 174/2026/ND-CP is the administrative fine schedule for postal, telecom, radio-frequency, e-transaction and IT breaches, including the Article 95 tickets that now land on users and group admins.

Disclaimer: This article is news reporting and analysis of Decree 174/2026/ND-CP and related social-media rules for general information only. It is not legal advice, is not a ruling on any post, page or group, and is not a prediction of how an inspector will treat a specific share, paste or takedown request. Readers who need a decision on their own account, page, licence or content should consult a licensed Vietnamese lawyer before they act. Fine bands, duties and enforcement practice reflect the decree and official briefings described here and can change through later guidance or new cases.