THE POLITICS OF POFMA: ASSESSING THE VALIDITY OF THE PROTECTION FROM ONLINE FALSEHOODS AND MISINFORMATION ACT

Grace Elizabeth Ho, Raffles Institution

Supervised by Professor Edson C. Tandoc Jr. & Mr. James Lee Chong Boi, Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University

ABSTRACT

In 2019, the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Misinformation Act (POFMA) was enacted to fight against the rapid spread of fake news, which has become more pervasive than ever in today’s post-truth era. It grants the government and its ministers the power to issue directives, or correction orders, to append statements of fact from the government alongside offending pieces of online content, which have been deemed to contain falsehoods. However, the validity of such an act has been called into question by many critics, who fear that it may become a state tool of censorship. Thus, my paper seeks to analyze the validity of POFMA, through creating a typography of the type of content likely to be served with POFMA directives, and evaluating the arguments presented in both offending posts and the POFMA directives.

INTRODUCTION

In the book “Post-Truth, Fake News And Democracy: Mapping the Politics of Falsehood,” researchers Jannick Shou and Johan Farkas write that proliferation of fake news has resulted in “scientific evidence [being] no longer trusted, with climate change being consistently labeled a hoax; medical evidence [being] sidestepped, as patients search for their own truth online; and “proper” journalism [coming] under attack from fake news farms, troll factories and social bots” (Farkas & Schou, 2019). In today’s post-truth era, fake news has become a tool to sow confusion, with many people being unable to discern fact from fiction. Nearly one in three Americans have seen a piece of fake political news online, with two in three of them saying that fabricated news stories have caused “a great deal of confusion” about the basic facts of current issues and events (Barthel, Mitchell & Holcomb, 2016). A similar trend can be found locally in Singapore, as a BBC study revealed that 59% of Singaporeans respondents found it difficult to distinguish fake news and real news (Chua, 2017), and another Ipsos study alarmingly found that 91% of Singaporeans between the ages of 15 and 65 incorrectly identified one or more pieces of fake news as being real (Ipsos, 2018).

Worsening this issue of fake news is the rise of new media, including social media and alternative sources of information such as blogs, which has accelerated the already-rapid spread of fake news by creating a gross oversupply of facts. Consumers are deluged with too much information from a diverse range of sources, with varying levels of authenticity, overwhelming them entirely (Davies, 2016). In this highly oversaturated environment, it is consequently very easy for fake news to pass unnoticed as real news, and end up becoming a part of people’s worldviews.

In response, numerous governments have tabled bills to criminalize its proliferation, to varying degrees of success: while some have been blocked on various grounds, they have been successful in others countries. Singapore is one such country with the Protection From Online Falsehoods and Misinformation Act (POFMA) being passed by parliament on May 8 and coming into effect on October 2. Comprising 62 sections, the purpose of the Act is two-fold: one, to prevent the online spread of falsehoods, which includes misleading information or false statements of fact, and two, to safeguard against the use of online platforms, particularly social media, for the communication of such falsehoods. Statements of fact that fall under the purview of the law are defined as “statements, which a reasonable person seeing, hearing or otherwise perceiving them would consider as representations of fact” (SSO, 2019).

From the get-go, the bill received considerable backlash and disapproval, with a multitude of stakeholders criticizing the unilateral, unopposed powers of government ministers. Jeff Paine, the Managing Director of Asia Internet Coalition, released a statement on behalf of the organization to express worry about the high possibility of government overreach, “We are also concerned that the proposed legislation gives the Singapore government full discretion over what is considered true or false. As the most far-reaching legislation of its kind to date, this level of overreach poses significant risks to freedom of expression and speech, and could have severe ramifications both in Singapore and around the world” (Asia Internet Coalition, 2019).

Human Rights Watch expressed a similar sentiment in their news release. Commenting about the bill, Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director said, “Singapore’s ministers should not have the power to single-handedly decree what is true and what is false. Given Singapore’s long history of prohibiting speech critical of the government, its policies or its officials, its professed concerns about ‘online falsehoods’ and alleged election manipulation are farcical (Human Rights Watch, 2019).”

The international response to POFMA was cold. The Economist adopted a scathing stance against POFMA in its article “Singapore Strikes Its First Official Blows Against Fake News” (The Economist, 2019), suggesting that it “adds to the government’s criticism-suppressing arsenal”. Across the Atlantic, the Guardian collaborated with Reuters on the article “Singapore Fake News Law A ‘Disaster’ for Freedom of Speech, Says Rights Group” (The Guardian, 2019), in which they report on several leading critics’ reasons for rejecting the bill. The International Court of Justice’s Asia Pacific director argued that there are very “real risks that it will be misused to clamp down on the free exchange and expression of opinions and information”.

The exact problem with POFMA was elucidated by University of Michigan professor Linda Lim in the Financial Times piece “Singapore ‘falsehoods’ Law Shows Perils of Fake News Fight'' (Palma, Munshi & Reed, 2020), “The distinction between ‘fact’ and ‘opinion’ is not always clear and the injury to the public interest is not convincingly demonstrated”. Chong Ja Ian, who is an associate professor of political science at the National University of Singapore, goes as far as to draw parallels to maximum governments, “Singapore has inadvertently put itself in the same league as regimes that can be a little bit excessively”.

Collectively, these reports across a variety of news organizations demonstrate that there is significant pushback against POFMA from all walks of life on a diverse spectrum of reasons, calling the necessity and validity of such legislation into serious question. Ergo, my project seeks to investigate the validity of the usage of the Protection From Online Falsehoods and Misinformation Act (POFMA) in Singapore. I seek to do a qualitative content analysis on POFMA’s invocations, in order to answer these research questions:

RQ1: What are the characteristics of offending posts served with POFMA directives?

RQ2: To what extent is the content of offending posts accurate? RQ3: Can the “accurate facts” presented in POFMA directives be corroborated by publicly available evidence?

By the project’s conclusion, I seek to shed light on whether POFMA in its execution fulfils its intended goals.

LITERATURE REVIEW

What is Fake News?

“Fake news” is broadly defined as news articles that are intentionally and verifiably false, and could mislead readers (Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017, p.213). It can take on many forms, such as news satire, news parody, news fabrication, advertising, photo manipulation, and propaganda. Not only do they imitate the look and feel of real news, they are even often part of larger networks of fake news sites to give off the illusion of a wide audience readership. Essentially, their seemingly credible appearance allows them to hide behind a veneer of legitimacy, undermining the credibility of authentic and real news (Tandoc, Lim & Ling, 2017).

In this study, however, I am particularly focused on fake news that is produced with malicious intent, that means to say, it has the potential capacity to mislead and cloud people’s judgement.

Addressing the Issue of Fake News

Different countries have adopted different approaches to tackle this issue of fake news, ranging from inaction to moderate prosecution, such as fines (Huang, 2020) and imprisonment (Novak, 2018), to harsh crackdowns, including blocking access to social media sites (Reporters Without Borders, 2020) and shutting down internet service providers entirely (Access Now, 2018). Generally, the more extreme punishments tend to be undertaken by relatively more authoritarian governments.

Arrests & Shutting down

Inaction Fines Imprisonment ISPs entirely

Lenient Extensive

Media Literacy Takedown of Social Media Fake News Sites Shutdown Extent of Government Intervention in the Issue of Fake News (Poynter, n.d.)

Past Research on POFMA

With only one year since its inception, the Act is still in its infancy stage and thus, research on it is scarce. Although Teo Kai Xiang (Teo, n.d.) has been classifying POFMA invocations on his website, this is only a surface level categorization of POFMA cases, such as the medium of content, and type of government response (e.g. Part 3, Part 4, or Part 5 direction) without substantial analysis into the content of the offending posts.

METHODOLOGY

This study utilizes a qualitative content analysis to analyze the news articles, social media posts, and YouTube videos that have been served with POFMA directives, as well as the POFMA directives themselves, with the aim of understanding how the Government utilizes the corrective powers of POFMA. The creation of this typology is the key precursor to evaluating whether the information labelled as “fake news” by the Government accurately constitutes as such. Combing through Factually, which is the official government database keeping record of all POFMA correction orders issued, I have found 70 unique pieces of content that have been served with POFMA correction orders between November 2019 and July 2020, which was the period of my data collection. It is important to clarify here that 70 unique pieces of content does not equate to 70 unique cases of fake news, because certain pieces of content, such as social media posts, repeat the same fake news that was previously propagated, albeit presented differently.

The second part of the data collection process involved finding the primary source of fake news, that means to say, the original offending post, which is woefully unavailable on the Factually page. While some were still publicly available online, others had already been taken down, and thus, I had to use the Wayback Machine to find an archived version of the page or use secondary blog sources that posted screenshots of the original post. Through a combination of these methods, the majority of original posts could be found. The ability to study the original post was highly important in ensuring that I was coding the original piece of content and not a second-hand interpretation of it.

Moving on to the data analysis process, which comprises two parts. Firstly, I developed a codebook to identify features and details within each piece of content so as to be able to create categories connecting different pieces of content together under wider themes, allowing me to extract generalizations about how POFMA is applied to them. An example of a code category is shown below.

ACTOR INVOLVED EXAMPLES:

This category looks at the (1) Opposition Politician identity of the actor involved (2) News Organization in the creation of the (3) Individual Activist offending post. (4) Social Media Users

Second, since the purpose of the POFMA Act is to curb the spread of online falsehoods, it is, therefore, crucial to analyze whether the offending posts truly constitute fake news. Here, I examined the arguments presented in both the offending post and the POFMA directive as to why the offending post was inaccurate, and evaluated the evidence supporting these arguments. In doing so, I was able to ascertain the accuracy of the content of the offending posts, as well as the validity of the POFMA directives in claiming that the offending posts were misinformation.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

Who Gets POFMA’ed?

The identity of actors whose content tends to get served with POFMA directives can be classified as follows:

The first group of actors are opposition politicians. Of any category of actors, opposition politicians are targeted with POFMA directives the most often: Mr. Brad Bowyer (Progress Singapore Party), Singapore Democratic Party, and Mr. Lim Tean (People’s Voice) are examples of politicians who have been served with multiple POFMA correction orders. While they have complied with the POFMA directive to append the government’s corrected facts to their original posts, they still keep the original posts online and sometimes even offer a rebuttal to the facts in the correction order.

There are two key characteristics of their content: First, they often utilize strong language to criticize the government. Mr. Brad Bowyer asserted that the PAP is “quite good at causing disasters on their own own” (Bowyer, 2019), while Mr. Lim Tean called the PAP “Mad, Bad, or Sad”. Second, their content criticizes a wide range of PAP policies: the Singapore Democratic Party criticizes the government’s policies towards attracting foreign workers (economic), the People’s Voice party criticized the government’s policies towards funding the education of foreign students (education, social) and the government agencies’ complicity in the spread of coronavirus cases through the mass gathering at Jurong (healthcare), and the Progress Singapore Party criticized Singapore’s fiscal policy and overseas investment holdings (economic). Since these posts were made in the lead-up to the 2020 General Elections, it can be inferred that their attacks on PAP’s policies seek to undermine public support for the government and sway voters to vote for their parties instead.

The second group of actors are social activists. Examples of activists who have been served with POFMA correction orders include: Kirsten Han, Alex Tan, and Gilbert Goh. Their responses to POFMA directives are varied: while some have complied, others have repeatedly refused to do so, invoking further POFMA directives and even takedown orders. The defining characteristic of the content of their posts is that they touch on contentious issues: Kirsten Han (Han, 2020) reposted an article about the brutality of corporal punishment in Singapore, while Alex Tan criticized foreign relations between Singapore and Malaysia (Tan, 2020).

The third group of actors are activist groups, including the National University of Singapore Society, Lawyers for Liberty, Say No to PAP, and the New Naratif. They have all complied with appending the government’s set of facts to their original posts. Like the social activists abovementioned, their issues are also highly controversial: the New Naratif challenges the government’s propensity for abuse of POFMA powers (New Naratif, 2020), while Say No to PAP accused the government of covering up the accurate number of coronavirus cases in Singapore (Say No to PAP, 2020). Citizen journalist sites, that means to say that they are alternatives news organizations run by members of the public, such as The Online Citizen, The Temasek Review, the States Times Review, and the Independent Singapore, largely cover the same issues as well, but they do not comply with POFMA orders, leading to a few of them being blacklisted in Singapore.

The fourth group of actors are individual social media users, such as Facebook users and Hardware Zone users. The reason why these users specifically have been flagged out with POFMA correction orders is because their posts have the capacity to cause mass alarm: several anonymous Facebook users uploaded posts claiming that Woodlands MRT had been closed due to possible transmission of the coronavirus there, while another anonymous Hardware Zone user claimed that Singapore had its first death of a coronavirus patient in Singapore.

Accuracy of POFMA Content

The accuracy of the content of offending posts varied quite substantially, and thus, in the following section, I will break down the different levels of accuracy.

First, there are the most truthful pieces of content, which contain evidence from verified sources. The Singapore Democratic Party and the People’s Voice party used statistics from official government data to back up their arguments (SDP, 2020) and the National Times based their arguments off ministerial statements and records of ministers’ past actions (State News Singapore, 2020). For these posts, I evaluated that POFMA was not very necessary, because the posts provide one interpretation of the statistics, and readers are able to derive their own conclusions as to whether the arguments hold water.

Second, there are the quasi-truthful pieces of content, which contain evidence but from nebulous sources. Several news organizations have used facts from anonymous or uncredited sources (States Times Review, 2020), while others use statistics from unverified websites (Bowyer, 2019; The Independent, 2020; The Online Citizen, 2020). The most dubious pieces of content claim to have tips from insider sources whose identities cannot be revealed, such as the Lawyers for Liberty having an insider source within the prison system (Lawyers for Liberty, 2020) and Singapore States Times having an insider working within the Ministry of Health (Singapore States Times, 2020).

Third, there are the pieces of content that are outrightly untruthful, where they claim to state facts but provide no supporting evidence at all. For instance, AB-TC City News claims that the government has covered up the real number of coronavirus cases, but does not provide any supporting evidence for their increased number of cases (AB-TC City News, 2020). For the second and third cases, I evaluated that POFMA was indeed necessary as a check and balance against the proliferation of baseless claims spreading online.

Lastly, there are pieces of content that are purely opinion-based, and thus do not really need facts to corroborate them, because the content creators are merely conjecturing scenarios. The New Naratif’s YouTube videos (New Naratif, 2020) serve as an excellent case here, where historian Thum Ping Tjin considers various scenarios in which POFMA could lead to government overreach. In these cases, it is important that POFMA does not interfere with individuals’ freedom to express their opinions and thoughts without fear of censorship.

Corroboration of Facts in POFMA Directives

Similar to the accuracy of the POFMA content, the ability to corroborate the “facts” in these POFMA directives differ wildly, but they can largely be boiled down into two categories.

First, there are POFMA directives with counter-facts that can be easily corroborated by evidence that is publicly available online. These include ministerial statements in Parliament (POFMA Directive against Mr. Lim Tean) as well as data available on government websites (POFMA Directive against the SDP). In these cases, POFMA is indeed necessary in informing Singaporeans with the true series of facts.

However, what is more alarming is the fact that the overwhelming majority of POFMA directives contain counter-facts that cannot be corroborated elsewhere, that means to say, that the POFMA directive does not provide links to supporting evidence or the evidence is not even publicly available online. This means to say that the POFMA directive serves as both the facts, and the supporting evidence for those facts, giving rise to the issue of opacity where the government’s words are expected to be assumed to be true.

Lastly, in the special case of opinion-based content, POFMA directives have been invoked against them for contradicting the government’s stance on these issues, even though there are no true-or-false facts, and only opinions. This is also alarming in suggesting that the government labels dissenting opinions as being “false”, even though they are only alternative perspectives.

LIMITATIONS AND FUTURE RECOMMENDATIONS

Behind every piece of content put out on the Internet is a person or entity who wrote it; and thus, the biggest limitation of this paper is that it merely studies the content of the posts and the POFMA directives themselves, but not the people who interact with them. Studying the responses of post or article creators to being served with a POFMA directive, through methodologies such as interviews or focus group discussions, could deepen our understanding on the effect that POFMA invocations have them, such as a potential chilling effect where post creators self-censor in an attempt to avoid being POFMA’ed in future. Of equal value is studying the responses of Singaporeans toward a POFMA invocation, such as social media comments on a post that has been served with a correction order, in order to understand Singaporeans’ reception toward POFMA, and whether the Act is well-received by them. Given that laws are enacted to improve people’s quality of life, it is therefore essential to evaluate whether the Act has benefited Singaporeans through the removal of online falsehoods or harmed them instead by clamping down on free speech online.

CONCLUSION

The objective of my research paper was to evaluate the necessity and validity of the POFMA Act, and the results of my research are mixed. On one hand, there are many cases in which people have clearly fabricated falsehoods and POFMA has been a useful tool in curbing their online spread, providing Singaporeans with the accurate facts to counter and discredit such misinformation. On the other hand, there are equally many cases in which individuals have expressed opinions about grey issues where there is no right or wrong, and yet, they have been served POFMA directives because they do not align with the government’s stance. In certain instances, there is not even any public information available to substantiate the claims made in the POFMA directive beyond the facts asserted in the POFMA directive itself, implying that Singaporeans are expected to trust the government’s facts as truth without credible supporting evidence. This is highly dangerous because it is precisely this lack of transparency and freedom of speech that many critics are concerned about, as mentioned in the introduction of my paper. Although there are both pros and cons to the POFMA Act, an analysis into the demographics of actors who are served with POFMA directives reveals that they are mostly dissidents against the government, such as opposition politicians, government critics, and activist groups. Thus, I argue that it is more important to prioritize free speech to prevent an overreach of government power silencing these opposition voices in the years to come.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This paper would not have been possible without the invaluable mentorship of my supervisors, Professor Edson C. Tandoc Jr. and Mr. James Lee Chong Boi, from whom I have learnt so much about conducting qualitative research analysis. I am tremendously grateful for their unwavering guidance through the rocky first few months of topic ideation, the multiple rounds of feedback on my work, and the numerous meetings to discuss my project despite their busy schedules. Thank you also to Nanyang Technological University and Raffles Institution for providing me with this research opportunity. Most importantly, my heartfelt gratitude goes out to Charlotte, Ka Yee, Ella, Moxie, Tasis, Michelle, Faith, Zainab, Elsa, and the Girls of Quiz Bowl, who have always been my pillar of support and encouragement through the struggles that this project presented to me. NRP has been one of my greatest academic and personal challenges, especially during this turbulent pandemic, so I cannot understate how meaningful this journey has been for me.

REFERENCES

Author’s Note: The codebook containing all my primary data, analysis, and links to offending posts can be found at http://bit.ly/GraceElizabethHoCodebook (case-sensitive). I could not include all the data here due to the ten-page limit and the fact that the codebook was created on an excel sheet.

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