Commentary: Vietnam’s police are joking online and that makes their messaging more serious

ANN ARBOR, Michigan: In Vietnam, saying “I’ll call the police on you” is a familiar tease, shorthand for the authority everyone instinctively understands. Thus, it was striking when a Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) police unit’s Facebook page recently reinvented itself as a meme hub.

Until October, the official Facebook page run by HCMC’s anti-drug police looked like any other official page feed, with routine updates, arrest photos, and boilerplate warnings. Then, on Oct 5, it abruptly shifted into playful, Gen Z slang, joking with followers, riffing on memes, and drawing a surge of followers who suddenly found a police account relatable.

The unit seems to be testing a new propaganda style: using humour to create a friendlier, more familiar voice. Research on political humour shows that this tone can make audiences more open to later messages they might otherwise resist.

A closer look at the page reveals a simple formula: Take an everyday moment, flip it into a meme and land on an anti-drug punchline. One viral post of a faux wedding proposal photo gained 108,000 reactions, 3,300 comments and 1,300 shares. It showed a groom lifting a laptop whose screen read, “Shall we turn in drug offenders together?”

The same structure is repeated: for instance, a breakup post becomes, “Why be sad and do drugs when prison is a hundred times sadder?”; a night out becomes “a familiar drift from drinks, to karaoke and a drug-fuelled club, to jail”.

By using slang, emojis and the familiar setup-punchline rhythm of online memes, it makes these police guidances feel like friendly banter. Across topics from heartbreak to nightlife, the page uses the same meme-to-moral formula with humour as the hook, but discipline as the landing point.

The page’s comment sections show how well this worked. Instead of scripted praise or coordinated amplification that is common on state-aligned social media pages, the responses are messy and unmistakably organic.

Users riff on jokes, tease the page admin or half-jokingly ask about cash rewards for turning in dealers. That blend of humour, irritation and candid exchange is precisely why the page now operates as a social space that Vietnamese youth are helping to shape.

ENTERTAINMENT-FOCUSED PROPAGANDA

The HCMC anti-drug page appears to mirror the “entertainment”-focused propaganda model that China has been refining for a decade. Under the banner of “positive energy”, for instance, state accounts on Weibo and Douyin mix memes and light entertainment with cues about patriotism and social order, turning official feeds into lifestyle channels with a law-and-order core. HCMC’s police meme page follows a similar logic.

Humour research helps explain why this design works. As American media scholar Dannagal Young argues, jokes can act as a “discounting cue”. Messages wrapped in humour feel less like propaganda and are more readily remembered and repeated; because audiences must “get” the joke, they partly complete the underlying moral themselves. Over time, the messenger feels familiar and benign.

In such a context, it becomes easier for subsequent value-loaded signals, including ones that would normally trigger reflexive defensiveness, to land with less resistance than they would from a formal statist voice.

That dynamic was visible in late October, when the HCMC police page pivoted from drug humour to warning that performers with song lyrics linked to drugs were unworthy of appearing onstage. The page’s followers, by then totalling around 273,000, split sharply: Some cheered the calls to “blacklist” and “ban” such artists, while others accused the page of hypocrisy, “dirty media” and double standards.

Yet almost no one disputed the idea that drug-linked lyrics are a legitimate concern. The commentators’ war revolved instead around where the line should be drawn and which artists should face consequences. In other words, the debate unfolded squarely inside the narrative that the page had already made intuitive: Drug-coded language in Vietnamese popular music is a problem the state is expected to address.

That framing quickly spilt beyond the page, with major news outlets covering the controversy by quoting the page for reference. Within days, HCMC’s government propaganda arm urged cultural agencies to avoid hiring artists who “breach cultural norms”. Soon after, central authorities called for a nationwide tightening of rules on “deviant” performances and lyrics.

WHAT CULTURAL FLUENCY ONLINE CAN ACHIEVE

As the Facebook page lets officials watch the public’s reactions in real time, the episode suggests another possibility: By tracking how much support or pushback certain posts draw, authorities could take the public’s temperature before formalising any move or change.

At a minimum, this episode showed how a trusted meme channel can shape the terms of debate. A framing that began on the page and was then echoed in mainstream coverage aligned closely with the cultural priorities that the authorities formalised soon after this turn.

None of this means Vietnam has perfected a new propaganda model. The experiment is a small one, and its reception has been uneven. However, the mechanics are striking. In an online environment infamous for manufactured consent (in Vietnam’s context), a police account that sounds like a peer rather than an authority becomes a rare asset, as it can broaden the public’s receptivity to whatever issues it chooses to spotlight.

Western commentators often argue that authoritarian governments, including Vietnam’s, are structurally bad at humour, as they are too worried about loss of face to loosen their tone. This police meme page complicates the picture, showing that, with the right format and voice, state actors can borrow the affect of youth culture without immediately losing control.

Whether this style of public outreach can be scaled across Vietnam’s sprawling, inconsistent propaganda apparatus remains an open question. In other domains, the machinery defaults to patronising messaging that young people tend to tune out.

The police Facebook page shows what demonstrating cultural – or inter-generational – fluency online can achieve. This may be why the experiment may look attractive to officials, even if it remains difficult to reproduce elsewhere in the system.

Dien Nguyen An Luong is Visiting Fellow, Media, Technology and Society Programme at ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute. This commentary first appeared on ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute’s site, Fulcrum.