How Singapore's "fake news" law gets exported

I woke up in the morning of 22 January 2020 to an official email: “Dear Ms Han, the attached letter from the POFMA Office is for your attention and follow up. Thank you.”

Attached to the email was a PDF; when I opened it, I realized I’d been issued a “correction direction” under the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act, more commonly known as POFMA, Singapore’s anti-“fake news” law.

A week before I received this email, I’d shared a post on Facebook linking to the website of the established Malaysian human rights group Lawyers for Liberty. In an article on their website, they claimed that they’d interviewed a Singapore Prisons Service officer who had alleged that prison officers were directed to break the necks of death row inmates if executions — carried out in Singapore by long-drop hanging — were botched (if the rope broke, for instance).

The Ministry of Home Affairs insisted in a press release that these allegations were completely false, and that there has never been an execution in Singapore during which the rope broke. In the correction direction I received, I was given about 24 hours to post a correction notice, the wording of which was specified in the letter emailed to me. Although I had the option to appeal to the Minister of Home Affairs — the one who issued the order — to ask that he change his mind, I was still required to first publish the correction. “Failure to comply with this Direction without reasonable excuse is an offence under Section 15 of the Act,” I was warned.

I eventually published the correction notice, as required, at the top of my Facebook post. But I also added some commentary below it, noting that while I was legally required to publish the government’s correction, I was concerned about the use of POFMA directives in such cases, particularly since there is very little public information available about executions in Singapore. I also pointed out that, after sharing the post on Facebook, I had sent questions, as both a journalist and an anti-death penalty activist, to the Singapore Prison Service, and had been ignored, until I was slapped with a correction direction.  

I wasn’t alone. Lawyers for Liberty, the Yahoo! Singapore news portal, and independent news website The Online Citizen received similar orders to publish correction notices. When Lawyers for Liberty refused to comply, the government issued a further order to block domestic access to their website.

POFMA came into force in Singapore in October 2019. The law affords government ministers the power to issue orders demanding corrections, content removal, and the blocking of access to social media pages and websites. As of July 2020, the government had issued over 70 directives, mostly concerning content on Facebook. Although most of these directives — like the one that I received — demanded the publication of corrections without any further action, there have also been orders to platforms like Facebook telling them to block access to particular pages.

POFMA orders have targeted a range of online content in Singapore. They can be issued by any government minister, and are sent out via the POFMA Office, a department set up specifically for this purpose. Prior to elections, ministers are also able to appoint civil servants as “alternate authorities” to exercise POFMA’s powers during the campaigning period. Orders are accompanied by press releases published online; some, demanding corrections of misinformation about COVID-19, have not been controversial. But many more have triggered alarm about a chilling effect on free speech, in an environment where self-censorship is already widespread. Although democratic on paper, Singapore functionally operates as a one-party state under the People’s Action Party (PAP), which has ruled since 1959. The first four POFMA orders, issued in November and December 2019, targeted opposition parties, or people affiliated with the opposition — a situation that the government characterized as an “unfortunate coincidence.” More recently, orders were issued against comments made by an opposition politician criticizing the government’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Singapore’s parliament — where PAP enjoys a supermajority — passed POFMA after just two days of debate in May 2019. Citing the dangers of misinformation and disinformation spreading at lightning speed online, government ministers framed POFMA as a crucial shield against a scourge of disinformation poisoning the well of Singaporean discourse and eroding trust between the people and their government.

“Singapore is a specific, and vulnerable, target for some very precise reasons,” Law Minister K Shanmugam argued in parliament during the second reading of the draft legislation.

The minister also referenced disinformation campaigns in other countries, including  Germany, where a fabricated claim about the assault of a young woman by three Middle Eastern migrants sparked xenophobic protests. “If it can happen in the UK and it can happen in Germany, I think it can easily happen here,” said Shanmugam.

The ruling party has claimed that POFMA was necessary to prevent such horrors from happening in Singapore. The legislation casts the government as the country’s defender; all that is required is for any minister to determine that a “false statement of fact” had been made, and that it would be in the public interest for action to be taken. Although the PAP defended POFMA by saying that such orders can be challenged in court, compliance is legally mandated.

In practice, only two recipients of POFMA orders chose to go to court. The Court of Appeal has yet to rule on appeals brought by the Singapore Democratic Party, which was ordered to correct their statements on unemployment in Singapore, and independent news website The Online Citizen, which is contesting the order to take down the Lawyers for Liberty post. The Online Citizen is also in the process of challenging another POFMA order over its reporting of a Taiwanese news show’s claims about the annual salary of Ho Ching, who is CEO of state investment company Temasek Holdings and wife of Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong. (Although POFMA technically has extraterritorial reach, the Taiwanese news outlet was not slapped with an order.) These cases have dragged on for months, long after media attention over them has faded.

There’s little transparency or publicly accessible data on how effective POFMA has been in combatting online misinformation and disinformation. Anecdotally, at least, misinformation continues to circulate in closed chat apps like WhatsApp and WeChat, as well as on social media pages and groups. For example, when the coronavirus was spreading throughout migrant worker dormitories last year, messages circulated on WhatsApp claiming that the workers, mostly of South Asian origin, were deliberately getting infected with Covid-19 so that they could be paid without having to work. There has also been misinformation about the Covid-19 vaccines.

The lack of clear evidence of POFMA’s efficacy hasn’t stopped other governments from drafting copycat laws. Singapore enjoys a positive international reputation as an efficient, corruption-free country with good governance, its laws and policies enjoy a veneer of legitimacy. Not long after Singapore passed POFMA, a similar law was proposed in the Philippines, although it ultimately failed to gain traction. The Nigerian senate has looked to introduce legislation that borrows heavily from POFMA. Nigerian journalists, including the Nigerian Union of Journalists, have expressed opposition to this law, describing it as an attempt to “pigeonhole Nigerians from freely expressing themselves”. China Daily, a Chinese state media platform, published an op-ed in 2019 in which a lawyer argued that Hong Kong should look to Singapore’s POFMA as a way to combat “fake news.” The Hong Kong government has since said that it will examine “loopholes” in its existing legislation.

Even if one trusts the current PAP government in Singapore to use POFMA responsibly — I do not — the law provides illiberal or authoritarian leaders the tools to control freedom of expression and suppress dissent.  

After the general election in July 2020, Singapore’s government stopped issuing POFMA orders. When I emailed the POFMA Office for an explanation in February 2021, an executive from the office’s contact center responded that “POFMA orders are only made when there is an assessment that the criteria set out in the legislation are met, and not otherwise. It has been made clear that POFMA orders will be made as necessary, when requirements for making the orders are met.”

The response doesn’t explain why government ministers stopped invoking the law. Yet it reveals the extent to which POFMA rides on the whims of those in power. The law continues to hang over Singaporeans’ heads, leaving journalists, activists, and NGOs wondering whether it might be invoked when they report on sensitive issues or criticize the government. POFMA is not just a domestic problem. Its illiberal logic is already spreading to other countries, threatening the freedoms of multiple societies at once.