Abstract
Journalists and human rights activists are worried that governments throughout southeast Asia will follow Singapore’s lead and exploit concerns about fake news to introduce Draconian legislation – and that Singapore’s use of such laws could legitimise similar action by even more authoritarian states, such as China.
“I expect we will next see copycat ‘fake news’ laws modelled on Singapore’s law from the likes of Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, Myanmar, and other rights-repressing governments,” said Phil Robertson, deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia division.
“Human rights-abusing ideas spread between governments [in south-east Asia] like the flu at a kindergarten.”
The Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act was introduced by Singapore’s government in April, and pushed through via its parliamentary super-majority a month later. It allows any government minister, all of whom come from the People’s Action Party which has been in power since 1959, the power to issue directives which can demand correction notices, content removal, and even the blocking of access to online content. The only criteria will be that the content contains statements that are “false or misleading” and the minister thinks it is in the “public interest” to do so.
Robertson told Index that the law also sought to apply restrictions to content communicated from outside the country if an end-user in Singapore could access it. This would allow ministers to force their judgments about what was “misleading” or “false” onto the wider internet, not just in south-east Asia but all around the world.
“Singapore is setting itself up to be Big Brother to censor and control internet posts and force ‘corrections’, and this will pose profound threats to freedom of expression and press freedom,” he said.
This is an especially salient concern given Singapore’s international reputation as one of the most outward-facing nations in the region.
The country is seen to have an efficient, highly-respected government, so the act’s passage could legitimise the introduction of such laws among its neighbours. Political scientist Chong Ja-Ian is particularly worried about the effects on China. “The extra-territorial reach and restrictions of the law, if copied by significant entities like China, given the legitimisation that Singapore provides, could mean that these jurisdictions may be more able to pressure and restrict opinion abroad,” he said.
As Tess Bacalla, executive director of the south-east Asian Press Alliance, said: “Other countries embarking on the same path as Singapore certainly do not need to copy the city-state’s controversial draft law. But what it does is to embolden such states (as well as those contemplating the idea of enacting similar laws) to pursue the single-minded goal of silencing public voices, knowing full well they are not alone in this otherwise despicable endeavour.”
Singapore’s neighbours have already shown a willingness to clamp down on independent media outlets and harass journalists with arrests and lawsuits, as seen in countries such as Cambodia, where independent news outlets have been shut down, or in the Philippines, where journalists including Rappler’s Maria Ressa find themselves kept busy with prosecutions and arrest warrants.
CREDIT: Anne Derenne/Cartoon Movement
The state of press freedom is poor in the region. In the latest World Press Freedom Index, drawn up by Reporters Without Borders, six out of 11 south-east Asian countries had declined in the rankings.
Vietnam has introduced cyber-security laws that give the government power to compel social media companies to censor content, although it is not yet clear how the authorities are planning to enforce it. In the hands of such governments, a law like Pofma could allow critical reporting or criticism to be branded as “false statements” in need of “correction” or censorship on the grounds of broadly defined “public interest”.
Pofma, as it has been enacted in Singapore, is pernicious because it can cause the shutdown of entire websites. If a website or page has received three such directives in a six-month period, any minister will be able to make it a “declared online location”, the effect of which would be to ban the site from earning any revenue, be it through advertising, subscriptions, or even donations. On top of this, Pofma also allows ministers to exempt anyone they want from this law.
The act could also be bad news for Singapore’s independent media scene, where alternative platforms that cover political news with a critical eye are already struggling to survive.
“Under the proposed law, three strikes and any one of the sites can be out. You need to go through legal appeal in order to overturn the ruling, and even if you are in the right, so what? What kind of publication can survive and start again afresh after being deprived of income and active readership, and the repeated threat of closure in the near future?” said Terry Xu, chief editor of The Online Citizen, a stalwart presence within the country’s alternative media scene.
Unsurprisingly, this piece of legislation has attracted plenty of criticism from tech companies, international non-governmental organisations, academics, journalists, artists, writers, local civil society activists and even the United Nations special rapporteur for freedom of expression. Many of these critics have pointed to Singapore’s already problematic record when it comes to press freedom and free speech, arguing that, in such a context, it would be unwise to grant the government more power to control the narrative. Singapore’s law and home affairs minister, Kasiviswanathan Shanmugam, has sought to reassure Singaporeans, saying that “99% of the people don’t have to worry about what they do 99% of the time”.
This hasn’t done much to convince local activists. “The law was designed to crack down on critics the government doesn’t like. This is their real intention,” says civil rights activist Jolovan Wham. “Such assurances are false because laws affect everyone equally.”
Even without a law like Pofma, Xu and his publication have already been accused of false or misleading reporting. Human Rights Watch’s report on freedom of expression in Singapore, released in 2017, has also been denounced by the People’s Action Party as a “deliberate falsehood”.
But Xu isn’t the only one who is alarmed. Criticism of the law came from a number of different fronts, most of which were taken aback by the bill’s scope and the powers handed over to the government.
“By failing to distinguish between a malicious falsehood and a genuine mistake, the proposed legislation places an unnecessarily onerous burden on even journalists acting in good faith,” a group of journalists wrote in an open letter addressed to the minister for communications and information, S Iswaran. Signatories to the letter include Clare Rewcastle Brown of the Sarawak Report; Andrew MacGregor Marshall, former Reuters deputy bureau chief in Bangkok; and former BBC, CNN and Al Jazeera English anchor Veronica Pedrosa.
“News organisations might feel compelled to withhold important stories simply because certain facts cannot be fully ascertained,” the journalists added. “This is especially likely in Singapore, where it is often not possible to get a response in time from the government.”
It isn’t just press freedom that will be affected – human rights activists who monitor discrimination, marginalisation and abuses say their work could also be caught in the crosshairs. “My concerns are around LGBT survivors who suffered from institutional discrimination,” said LGBT activist Jean Chong.
“With Pofma it could mean our words against theirs. And exposing state agencies could potentially become even more dangerous because any minister could, at his understanding of fake news and discretion, decide that we are lying and the state agencies are not.”
While the Singapore government has pointed out that Pofma’s provisions are in some aspects narrower than existing laws, which already allow for takedown orders or prosecutions, journalism professor Cherian George points out that more calibrated legislation isn’t necessarily a cause for relief.
“China-style blocking is so extreme that the Singapore government has, sensibly, never used it against good-faith news media and blogs,” he wrote in recent blog posts. “In contrast, Pofma would allow ministers to intervene in media cheaply. Considering the government’s track record of overreaction, the temptation to play with this toy may prove irresistible.”
In his defence of Pofma during its second reading, Shanmugam stood firm against the criticism and argued that the law would, in fact, be beneficial for democracy. He pointed to situations in countries such as the USA, claiming that misinformation had eroded public trust in their governments and institutions.
“Democracy is under serious threat. It is unwise for us to just watch and do nothing because it can sweep us over very quickly,” he said.
Wham isn’t buying this justification. “The law minister’s claim that Pofma will preserve democracy is a joke and should be mocked for its stupidity,” he said. “Which proper democracy in this world gives arbitrary powers to any minister to decide what’s true or false and to compel takedowns and to force people to issue clarifications at their whim and fancy?”