The Singapore government warned that “persistently political” websites would be required to register with the Government and be subject to the same restrictions as political party websites.
Far from having a chilling effect on local “blogosphere” (the community of blogs), many bloggers simply ignored the directive. Numerous blogs sprang to action to cover the elections, discussing many issues which the Government-controlled mainstream media had omitted. Mobile phone videos of almost every opposition rally were uploaded to video sharing site YouTube and cross-posted on blogs, despite a controversial law which bans “party political” videos in Singapore.
Local humour writer mrbrown created a series of digital audio recordings, dubbed “persistently non-political podcasts”, in a spoof of the minister’s warning. His podcasts used everyday Singaporean experiences to poke fun at various players in the election, particularly the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP). One clip after the election results featured a student boasting to his friends that he scored 66.6% in his examinations. That figure was the percentage of the popular vote that the PAP had garnered, and which the mainstream media had proclaimed was a decisive victory. However, inSingapore’s highly competitive academic culture, a score like that would be considered mediocre at best.
Some were surprised that the Government did not take any action against these law-breaking bloggers. After all, this was a government that had always enforced laws that they enacted, especially those oriented towards managing political dissent.
The Singapore Government had earlier said that as part of their efforts to promote the use of the Internet to the country’s economic advantage, it would adopt a “light touch” towards regulating online content. So far, this promise has been largely kept. There have been only three Singaporeans who have been publicly hauled in for material posted on the Internet. All had posted offensive remarks about other ethnic groups or religions — a taboo in multi-racial Singapore. To date, no Singaporean has got in trouble for posting dissenting political views. This is despite the fact that most political expression on the Internet is critical of the Government (One PAP MP, Denise Phua, put the figure at 85%).
Some have attributed the lack of enforcement to the inability of the Government to find violators who use pseudonyms to cloak their identity. This is a mistaken assumption, as the “racist” bloggers — all of whom used pseudonyms — would attest. Nevertheless the sheer number of bloggers makes it impractical to hunt down every one of them.
Paradoxically, humourist mrbrown was fired as a columnist from mainstream newspaper Today for an article that sarcastically declared that Singaporeans were “fed up with success”. Among other things,mrbrown had criticised Singapore’s high cost of living. Such an article would not have raised an eyebrow had it been posted online. The Government was signalling a different treatment for political expression online and in the mainstream media (To be exact, the Government did not sack mrbrown. The information minister’s press secretary merely wrote a strongly-worded letter to the newspaper’s editor. The signal, however, couldn’t be clearer).
The Government’s rationale is not hard to guess: The traditional media reaches out to a far larger audience than the Internet, even in a highly-wired society like Singapore. Mainstream English newspapers The Straits Times and Today have a combined daily readership of over 1.7 million, while even the most popular local socio-political websites are each visited by no more than 9,000 readers a day. After factoring in television and the vernacular press, it is clear that the mainstream media has a commanding mindshare of voting citizens.
To differentiate society’s level of acceptance of the news from the mainstream media and the Internet-based media, the Government has attempted to portray the latter as irrational and unreliable compared to the former. In a speech to international journalists in October 2006, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong charged that the Internet “enables clever propaganda, inflammatory opinions, half-truths and untruths to circulate freely and gain currency”.
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