Singapore has ordered Facebook’s parent company, Meta, to block Singaporeans’ access to posts made by three foreigners accused of trying to influence the general election scheduled for May 3.
In a joint statement on Friday, the Ministry of Home Affairs and Elections Department Singapore stated that posts by the foreigners – two from Malaysia and one from Australia – threatened the city-state’s ethnic and racial cohesion.
As a result, the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) issued orders to Meta to block local access to their posts. The order was made under new social media legislation passed in 2023, which bars foreigners from publishing “online election advertising,” any material that is “intended to promote or prejudice the electoral success or standing of a political party or candidate.”
The first of the three Facebook users was identified as Iskandar Abdul Samad, the national treasurer of the Malaysian Islamist party PAS, who “expressed support for a candidate” in the GE. The second was a Facebook user identified as Zulfikar bin Mohamad Shariff, an Australian citizen who renounced his Singapore citizenship in 2020, who “accused several Malay-Muslim Members of Parliament of failing to represent the interests of the Muslim community.” The third user was a PAS youth leader in Selangor state who reposted Zulfikar’s post.
In the statement, the Home Affairs Ministry and ELD said that the posts “interfere with our domestic politics” and “urge Singaporeans to vote on racial and religious lines.” It added, “All this has the potential to fracture the multi-racial and multi-religious harmony that is the bedrock of our nation.”
The request to Meta reflects the Singaporean government’s extreme sensitivity about the country’s ethnic cohesion, and its paranoia about anything that could divide the country’s Chinese, Malay, and Indian communities.
Faced with the challenge of forging a unified Singaporean identity for the city-state that they led into independence in 1965, the PAP’s leaders have long acted swiftly in response to perceived foreign influence operations. In 1971, it arrested three editors of the Chinese-language Nanyang Siang Pau, whom it accused of waging “a deliberate campaign to stir up Chinese racial emotions.” At the time, the government said that it had “taken action to prevent these men who, under cover of defending Chinese language and education, are letting loose forces which will sharpen conflict along race, language, and culture lines.” In 1988, Singapore expelled a U.S. diplomat after accusing him of cultivating Singaporeans “as proxies to influence domestic politics.” More recent discussions of foreign influence operations have focused on an apparent increase in Chinese outreach and influence efforts targeting Singaporean Chinese, part of the Chinese government’s wider pitch to members of the “Chinese family” overseas.
However, with the growing salience of social media and frictionless digital communications in recent years, the PAP government has armed itself with a number of new laws to combat perceived interference in its domestic affairs.
The Online Safety (Miscellaneous Amendments) Act, which authorized this week’s takedown orders to Meta, was passed in November 2022 and came into effect early the following year. The law makes social media platforms legally liable if they fail to protect local users from online harms, and authorizes the IMDA to issue orders to social media platforms to take down offending content. According to the Straits Times, this includes “posts advocating suicide, self-harm, child sexual exploitation and terrorism, as well as materials that may incite racial or religious tensions or pose a risk to public health.”
A year earlier, Parliament passed the Foreign Interference (Countermeasures) Act, which empowers the state to compel internet and social media platforms to disclose information on users, remove content, and block user accounts. The Home Affairs Ministry justified these powers on the grounds that Singapore is “especially vulnerable to such influence, given its open, highly digitally connected, and diverse society.”
A similar logic impelled the passage of the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act, passed in 2019, which gives the government the power to counter falsehoods that are detrimental to the “public interest.” It empowers the state to declare information posted online as “false,” and if deemed to be in the public interest, to order the content’s “correction” or removal.
As with many characteristics of PAP rule, the question is whether these wide-ranging actions are commensurate with the extent of the challenges they are intended to solve, and whether the nation’s fabric is indeed as loosely woven as the government is wont to claim. So far, all three of these laws have been criticized for their broad remit and elastic terms, and for being used to silence legitimate dissent and criticism of the Singaporean government.
While last week’s takedown orders were relatively innocuous, so too, arguably, was the threat that they posed to the integrity of the upcoming election. They point once again to the fact that the PAP would rather be safe than sorry, and would rather restrict the boundaries of acceptable expression within Singapore than allow for the airing of ideas that it views as detrimental to the country’s social and ethnic cohesion.