Hanoi suspends online survey on public loudspeakers over alleged sabotage
Wednesday, February 08, 2017, 15:17 GMT+7
The Hanoi information department has put off an online survey asking city-dwellers whether the city’s public loudspeaker system should be removed, saying alleged hackers had manipulated the results.
The survey, launched on the Hanoi portal on January 25, asked pollsters to evaluate the effectiveness of the system, consisting of loudspeakers installed across the capital city, in spreading news to local residents.
The poll was launched following widespread complaints that the loudspeakers are too noisy, affecting the lives of people who live near them, and that such a means of spreading information is no longer necessary in these times of the Internet and social media.
However, on Tuesday, the Hanoi Department of Information and Communications had to suspend the voting, saying “the number of voters had increased at an unusual speed starting Sunday.”
By Sunday, the poll had received some 3,000 votes, but the number surged to 178,000, or 60 times, just two days later.
Following the spike of voters, those opposing the idea of scrapping the public loudspeakers outnumbered the supporters.
The poll now displays an error message
“The online feedback platform might have been hacked,” Phan Lan Tu, director of the information department, said.
The department said on Tuesday they were identifying the cause and method of the attack to fix the problems to ensure the objectiveness of the final poll results.
Even though Tu said voting would reopen on Wednesday, a check by Tuoi Tre News at 3:00 pm found nothing but an error message reading “Resources not found” on the platform at https://hanoi.gov.vn/tham-do-y-kien.
The information department said citizens can still voice their idea on the public loudspeakers by sending emails to pbcxbtt_sotttt@hanoi.gov.
The public loudspeaker system has been around in Hanoi for more than half a century, functioning as a medium for authorities to inform citizens of important news and policies.
In modern times, when everyone can watch TV, read newspaper and surf the Internet, the old-time loudspeakers, which start ‘speaking’ since early in the morning, have been rapped for causing headaches, literally, to locals.
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