Vietnam’s Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung has called on the country’s netizens to work together to struggle for reason, fairness and other noble values as well as establish a civilized Internet environment in the Southeast Asian nation.

The Vietnamese government chief made the call in his paper written on the topic of the Internet and national development to mark 18 years of Vietnam’s connection to the World Wide Web (November 19, 1997) and welcome Global Cybersecurity Day (December 12).

The paper was published in Vietnamese by the Government Portal on Thursday.

“I call on everybody to act as citizens with a high sense of responsibility in using social media networks in particular and the Internet in general,” he said in the article.

“Information, images, and data should be uploaded and shared with a high sense of awareness and responsibility,” he wrote. “The country’s netizens should join hands to struggle for reason, fairness and other noble values to establish, maintain and develop a civilized Internet environment in Vietnam.”

PM Dung also emphasized that the Internet is not only a technological environment, a business environment or a connectivity environment, but also an important cultural and educational environment, which has effects on the formation of personality and contributes to shaping humankind’s culture in the future.

The Internet is also an important tool to enhance openness and transparency, help ensure the rights of democracy and freedom, human rights, and civil rights in a progressive, law-governed state in which all power belongs to the people, the premier said.

“Therefore, building a cultural and humane Internet environment is what we must work on together,” he wrote.

The Vietnamese government welcomes Global Cybersecurity Day, with “For a Clean and Pure Internet” theme, and highly values the building of the Ethics Code of Conduct for Cyber Peace and Security initiated by professors of the Boston Global Forum, PM Dung said in his article.

“Over the past two decades, Vietnam has consistently applied a policy on creating favorable conditions for the development of the Internet,” the article says.

“By the end of 2014, Vietnam had nearly 45 million Internet users, accounting for over 49 percent of the population, which was higher than the average usage rate of the world (40.4 percent) and also exceeded that of the Asia-Pacific region (32.4 percent),” it adds.

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