Media presentations of Vietnam's cybersecurity law: A comparative approach with corpus-based critical discourse analysis

Abstract

The study uses corpus-based critical discourse analysis to examine the divergent framing and positioning of cybersecurity issues and Vietnam's Cybersecurity Law by state-sponsored media and international media through topic modeling, bigram and trigram collocation, and concordance analyses. The findings reveal that Vietnam's national media tend to justify the law by emphasizing human-related cyber threats, legitimizing national security, and delegitimizing opposing forces. In contrast, international media outlets focus on providing critical comments, criticism, and real-life events of human rights violations in the country to question and confront the law's legitimacy. The study also analyzes the competitive and tense nature of the discourses, characterized by antagonistic responses between the two media sources.