TIME FOR A CODE OF CONDUCT

Some pro-government websites are going too far, violating principles set out by the Select Committee on Deliberate Online Falsehoods.

Singapore needs a code of online conduct for all political parties and government bodies, committing them to more ethical and transparent use of internet tools. Public opinion manipulation by politicians, their functionaries, and their hardcore supporters is threatening Singaporeans’ ability to conduct reasoned debates about national issues, and exposing individual citizens to the harms of hate speech.

Like anything on the internet, such toxicity cannot be regulated out of existence, nor need we even try. But self-regulation by major political parties as well as the internet user with the loudest voice — the government — can go a long way towards cleaning up our political discourse.

There are at least three key core commitments that a code of conduct could flesh out:

1. No to all inauthentic behaviours, such as using fake social media accounts and paid human trolls to mislead people about the state of public opinion.
2. Yes to full transparency in public communication, with no hidden or opaque sponsorship of content, or use of anonymous sites.
3. No to supporters who propagate lies and incite hatred in your name: disown or correct those who abuse others, including your political opponents.

Instituting such a code of conduct is a major piece of unfinished business arising from the deliberations of the 2018 Parliamentary Select Committee on Deliberate Online Falsehoods.

The Select Committee’s report expressed concern about these and other tools: fake social media accounts to infiltrate communities and amass support; human trolls and automated bots to make falsehoods go viral; and digital advertising tools and for-profit political consultants using data analytics to micro-target messages at susceptible demographics.

On transparency, the Select Committee endorsed several experts’ recommendation to compel disclosure about whether content was paid for, and by whom. This transparency should be required of all forms of issue-based messaging, and not just campaign advertising, it said. “The goal of such transparency is to educate users on the behaviour and intent of other content providers they encounter online, and reduce the opportunity for malicious actors to hide behind Internet anonymity to carry out abusive activities,” the Committee said.

It added: “Users ought to be provided with sufficient information to know whether they are interacting with accounts belonging to and managed by a real person, or whether they are interacting with accounts run by a bot, or with an account where someone is impersonating another. Impersonation is often used to create an appearance of popularity, to increase the influence of the online falsehoods propagated by inauthentic accounts. This is not a trivial concern; inauthentic accounts operating on a broad scale have the potential to disseminate widespread disinformation.”

Select Committee Hearings, 2018.

But, there was a major problem with the Select Committee’s report. It was like a large illuminated mirror giving us a better look at our online environment — but tilted at an angle to keep the government out of view. After setting out key ethical principles for online public discourse, it recommended their imposition on everyone else, especially internet platforms such as Facebook, but not on the state or the ruling party.

This seed of selective vision ultimately sprouted into the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act (Pofma), through which only government ministers get to trigger a correction or takedown order — as if it is inconceivable that any current or future office holder would ever be guilty of a false or misleading statement of fact.

A year since the passage of Pofma, it is time to make up for that blind spot in internet regulation.

Watching the watchers

Many Singaporeans will find the idea of holding the government accountable for its own speech quite radical. They trust that the government will act as a responsible policeman who does not need policing. This helps explain why Pofma was met with indifference and even positive support by the general public.

It is true that many extreme forms of disinformation are likely to come from overseas: agents of the People’s Republic of China trying to prise Singapore out of America’s sphere of influence; India’s Hindutva nationalists sowing hatred against Muslims; our neighbours’ radical Islamists preaching religious exclusivity and intolerance; and Fox News selling its MAGA worldview, along with bleach and malaria medication as treatments for the “Chinese Virus” (why the Temasek-controlled Starhub CableVision persists in giving Fox a perch in Singapore continues to confound me).

But we should not confuse extremity with impact. Low-grade manipulation by the powers that be can have a more pernicious influence than foreign or fringe attacks. Decades of research on media effects tell us this. And hate speech jurisprudence around the world is based on this insight: the European Court of Human Rights, for example, considers not just what is said but also who is saying it and in what context. Party leaders are held to a higher standard because they are more likely to incite harm than, say, a blogger or poet without a big following.

We also know from more recent research that the questionable methods of right-wing populist movements have gone mainstream, with more and more centrist governments deciding that if you can’t beat them, join them. In Indonesia, for example, President Joko Widodo’s camp has invested in the same tools of online persuasion as his less palatable foes. A report by the Oxford Internet Institute last year confirmed that governments are emerging as major players in social media manipulation.

Singapore was not included in the 70-country Oxford study, and although we do not lack individuals with the skills to undertake the required forensics, the ones with the time to do it mostly work in universities and other research centres subject to political constraints. We can surmise that Singapore, a global pioneer in e-government, is probably not falling behind in computational propaganda. Beyond that, most of what we do know is anecdotal. Many seasoned netizens are able to tell you if someone criticising you on Facebook is a good-faith interlocuter, a troll, or a fake account. One giveaway is to check the account’s history. If it has only three posts and five friends, it was probably made up just for the occasion — the digital equivalent of out-of-towners bussed in to beef up an election rally audience. But to make such fraud harder to detect, the operator can buy or hijack established accounts. High quality social media manipulation is expensive, which is why states do it better than fringe groups — and why many governments are no longer cowed by the internet and believe this is a war they can win.

Studies in other countries also tell us that computational propaganda involves a division of labour among various kinds of actor. At the centre of the enterprise is usually the ideological machinery of the government or party, churning out major talking points and identifying threats that need to be neutralised. The hub would also include a professional IT arm and data analysts, plus a media team to create content for a leader’s Facebook page, for example.

But a large volume of social media postings usually come from a separate layer of diverse players acting with considerable autonomy, including organisations and individuals affiliated to the party, and private websites covertly funded by the regime. Also craving a piece of the action are for-profit PR consultancies, often using foreign expertise. Governments and parties outsource some of their online operations to these mercenaries, who then marshal bot armies and engage in other dark arts at an arm’s length from their clients.

Finally, the most populous category in most countries comprises the unpaid volunteers who enlist in the cause out of conviction. Many of them may be trying sincerely to add value to the marketplace of ideas, but others have the self-awareness and social graces of a three-year-old (no offence to toddlers). They pick up on their leaders’ dog-whistles, share disinformation created by IT cells and PR consultants, and disrupt serious conversations with their tribal war chants. They believe they are doing god’s work, failing to realise that they themselves are victims of opinion manipulation.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is a major user of computational propaganda.

Worrying trends

In recent years, Singaporeans engaged in public debate have voiced alarm at the ratcheting up of intolerant national-populist rhetoric by the PAP. Supporters defame critics, claiming they are foreign-funded fiends who are threatening the country. For an academic like me, studying major hate movements around the world, I find their faint echoes in Singapore chilling. Government leaders have not taken this trend seriously enough, allowing their followers to continue believing that political opposition and independent journalism are equivalent to treachery and treason.

Last week, a particularly vile attack came from a pro-government Facebook account named Global Times Singapore (GTS). It was obviously reacting to a strongly-worded opinion piece by Sudhir Thomas Vadaketh in Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post (SCMP). GTS charged that Sudhir, along with other Singaporeans who have written for the paper — Ken Kwek, Tan Tarn How, PN Balji, Inderjit Singh and Donald Low — were contributing to a campaign by China to put pressure on Singapore. GTS defamed my wife, a senior SCMP editor, by suggesting that she is not acting professionally but using her position to help China put pressure on our country. It also defamed me, suggesting that I was instrumental in helping China by channeling these Singaporeans — two of whom I have met only once, maybe three to ten years ago — into my wife’s hands.

The allegation was so outlandish that most of us had a good laugh. Singaporeans who follow current affairs will recognise all the writers I’m alleged to have recruited for SCMP as belonging to the 95^th percentile of the country’s independent thinkers, and therefore singularly unsuitable candidates for any conspiracy. They will also know that the one and only reason why so many of Singapore’s best commentators have resorted to SCMP as a forum for their pieces is that Singapore’s throttled newspapers tend to be inhospitable to views deemed critical of the government. Singaporeans who follow the media in other parts of Asia and the world can also guess why the PAP and its hardcore supporters are so thin-skinned about critiques that open societies would consider mild. It must be because decades of tightly managed debate have acclimated officials to a public sphere suffused with friendly white noise, rendering them hypersensitive to the rare instances of robust criticism.

Although it is easy to ignore the Global Times Singapore post and move on, there are three reasons why we should insist that the government take such episodes seriously. First, they have the potential to cause harm to individual citizens who are so targeted. Several incidents around the world show that all it takes is a single nutcase to get fired up by a conspiracy theory before violent retribution is meted out against defenceless individuals. My wife and I have positions of responsibility in Hong Kong’s highly polarised spheres of media and academia respectively. Both these arenas have seen cases of individuals being targeted for vigilante violence after being branded as too pro-China or too anti-China. We felt safe knowing that nobody looking at our work could honestly label us as either. We did not expect to have to worry about disinformation from our own country exposing us to hatred and contempt.

Second, there is a cost to the public interest. Don’t take it from me. Take it from the Select Committee report. “Online falsehoods can derail democratic contestation, and harm freedom of expression,” it said. “Falsehoods can erode people’s trust in authoritative sources of information, which provide a foundation of facts for rational discourse. Psychological research has shown that being exposed to large amounts of misinformation can make people stop believing facts altogether, and decrease their engagement in public discourse.” The Select Committee also expressed concern about the proliferation of online news sources that “do not apply standards of professional journalism”. It identified public education and quality journalism as key pillars of nurturing an informed public. In Global Times Singapore, we see an archetype of a disinformation site attempting to undermine educators and professional journalists. The government needs to tell us if sites like this are excused from the principles and recommendations offered by the Select Committee, just because they are pro-PAP.

Third, there is also a cost to Singapore’s ruling party. I am not a PAP member, but if I were, I would be outraged at how pro-PAP sites are tainting my party’s hard-earned reputation for rational and sober governance. I would remind the party’s third and fourth generation leaders that Lee Kuan Yew, while always mindful of the popular will, resisted the populist temptation. I would advise them that people know you by the company you keep. Netizen Lee Kuan Yew would have remembered this, and not compromised his brand by liking or sharing comments from shady commentators sucking up to him. He would not have allowed the clarity of his message to be clouded by duffers and fools claiming to love him and hate his opponents. If my party leaders bristle at my counsel and prefer to surround themselves with sycophants and cheerleaders, I would know this is the beginning of the end for my beloved PAP.

Like he would care.

Of course, one could argue that sites like Global Times Singapore do not speak for the government, which therefore has nothing to account for. It could be an independent volunteer outfit inspired, but not coordinated nor endorsed, by any government or party official. Or it could be the product of a rogue sub-contractor of a third-party contractor of an official arm of the state. It could even be an anti-government operation disguised as pro-government in order to give the PAP a bad name (creating imposter sites is a well-documented Russian disinformation tactic). Since we do not know its provenance, it is premature to blame the government or the ruling party for it. But, whatever its origins, it is not unreasonable to expect leaders to tell us where they stand.

Time to take a stand

Granted, the online conduct of opposition supporters is often worse. But such counter-arguments belong in the realm of partisan politics, not the public interest; they are forays into whataboutism, not moral reasoning. Regardless of what others are doing, leaders have a responsibility to set the tone for their followers, and to correct those who claim to be their supporters when they are wrong. Singapore’s ruling party has a greater moral responsibility than the rest, because of its supersized influence. Just as Donald Trump is rightly chastised for being slow to condemn racism in his ranks, citizens should demand that Singapore’s political parties check the excesses of their hardcore supporters.

When such ugliness reaches dangerous levels on the anti-PAP side, I would apply the same standard. Correction: I have done that already, back in the days when I blogged more regularly about Singapore. In the 2011 general election campaign, for example, I was among the first commentators ordinarily critical of the government to decry netizens’ personal attacks on the debutante PAP candidate, Tin Pei Ling. I accused the anti-government Temasek Review of corrupting the political terrain with its report on Tin, even though I was rooting for her National Solidarity Party opponent, Nicole Seah.

The same year, when PAP backbencher Seng Han Thong made a racially clumsy comment about Malay and Indian MRT drivers and rightly apologised, I chided The Online Citizen for triggering a witch hunt against Seng by misreporting what he’d said. The influential alternative website, obviously stung by this criticism from an ally, painted a target on my back, for which I had to endure attacks from others in civil society.

Thus, I know first-hand that it is not easy to break ranks, defend opponents, and criticise allies when they behave like bullies. But, with that experience, I also know that it is not asking too much of elected representatives to do the same. There may be a short-term cost, but reinforcing basic norms will strengthen your spine and your movement in the long term.

So, I am listening out for what PAP leaders might have to say about Global Times Singapore. There is a higher chance than usual that such a statement would be forthcoming in this particular case. That’s because one of GTS’s targets, Inderjit Singh, happens to be a former PAP backbencher, and the Prime Minister’s GRC teammate to boot. Witnessing one of their own set upon by a rabid dog howling its devotion to the PAP cannot be a pleasant sight for PAP parliamentarians past and present. The leadership will need to comfort its own ranks — even if it wants to brush aside the wanton attack on nobodies like my wife and me.

Sometimes the internet forgets.

But a one-off, ad-hoc response is not enough. Populist nationalism has become endemic within the PAP. The party needs to draw a line for all to see.

An online code of conduct for political parties is not a new idea. Britain’s Labour Party, for example, requires all its members to abide by a Code of Conduct that includes a Social Media Policy. It expects members “to treat all people with dignity and respect”. Here’s more:

• We should not give voice to those who persistently engage in abuse and should avoid sharing their content, even when the item in question is unproblematic. Those who consistently abuse other or spread hate should be shunned and not engaged with in a way that ignores this behaviour.
• We all have a responsibility to challenge abuse and to stand in solidarity with victims of it. We should attempt to educate and discourage abusers rather than responding in kind.
• Trolling, or otherwise disrupting the ability of others to debate is not acceptable, nor is consistently mentioning or making contact with others when this is unwelcome.
• Anonymous accounts or otherwise hiding one’s identity for the purpose of abusing others is never permissible.

Obviously, such codes are never watertight. In any large community or organisation, no matter how loudly it proclaims its norms, there will always be some who deviate. That’s understandable. What matters, though, is how the group responds when its norms are violated. Do leaders “challenge abuse” and “stand in solidarity with victims of it”, to quote the UK Labour Party’s code? Or do they excuse or even tacitly endorse the abuse when the target is a critic or political opponent? How a leader responds to bad behaviour by its followers will define the character of the group; and reveal the measure of the man.

The ruling party and the government can demonstrate its stature by instituting a comprehensive internal code of conduct against online abuse that prioritises openness, transparency and honesty. We should expect nothing less from leaders who have pontificated about online toxicity as if it is the greatest threat to Singapore since Japanese bombers entered our airspace, and have gone on to construct the world’s most elaborate law against manipulation of online discourse — by anyone outside of government, that is.

But neither should we wait for politicians to act. A code of conduct can be a citizen initiative. We have enough expertise in technology, internet regulation, law, media ethics, and other relevant areas to produce such a code. And if political actors do not want to be part of the process, that itself tells us all we need to know.

Postscript, May 11

Friends tell me Global Times Singapore responded to the above (kind of). I don’t propose to reply to their eight anonymous administrators, because my issue is with the political masters they think they are serving, not the low-level functionaries operating such outlets (so low-level it didn’t occur to them that they might embarrass the Prime Minister by labeling his former GRC teammate as a PRC stooge: yes, Inderjit Singh, who served in the PAP grassroots from 1984 and as an MP for 18 years).

Why anonymous pro-PAP sites choose to remain anonymous is an interesting question. I have in the past engaged in dialogue with pro-PAP bloggers who have enough spine to reveal their identities. But the nameless variety is a different species altogether.

In Singapore, all other things being equal, being pro-PAP entails much less risk than being neutral or anti-PAP. Yet, all the critical voices that these pro-PAP attack dogs target have enough backbone to use their real identities — even the women who, global research shows, get trolled much more viciously than men.

So what is stopping these pro-PAP sites from saying who they are?

I suppose one reason is that anonymity shields them from defamation suits. Their political heroes use defamation law as one oracle to settle debates. But these sites don’t want to play by those rules — since this would require them to confine themselves to allegations that they can substantiate. (In the case of GTS, I have openly declared that they have defamed me.) I love the chutzpah of these types, carrying on the debate with such verve even though it’s obvious they can’t put their money where their mouth is.

Another possible reason why they insist on being anonymous is that they are civil servants, engaging in conduct they know violates PSD rules. A third possibility is that they are private sector hacks whose contracts require them to shield their clients from liability. It is also possible that several of these anonymous sites are being churned out from the same small factory (because, of course, efficiency is important): content producers trying to make people believe that Singapore is full of their kind. Revealing themselves would shatter the illusion.

And of course none of these suspicions makes the PAP look good, which is why I cannot understand the establishment’s tacit approval of such practices. Transparency and a code of online conduct would solve the problem.

CALIBRATED LEGISLATON?

Calibrated censorship is not always kinder.

One of the arguments being marshaled in defence of the government’s sweeping online falsehoods bill is that existing laws are actually even wider. In a Straits Times op-ed yesterday, Senior Counsel Siraj Omar pointed out that the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act (POFMA) would provide more “measured and calibrated” instruments than already exist in the Broadcasting Act and other legislation.

The Law Ministry has chimed in to say Omar is correct that POFMA “gives narrower powers to the Government, compared with powers the Government already has, under existing legislation”.

“The Bill does seek to scope down and calibrate the Government’s powers in key areas,” the ministry adds.

It is certainly true that some of POFMA’s features are more refined than existing laws. For example, receiving a correction directive under POFMA would be less painful than being hit with a defamation suit, or being charged with sedition, a Section 298 violation, or scandalising the judiciary—until now the most commonly used weapons against online political expression.

Similarly, POFMA’s take-down directives would be far less extreme than China’s mass blocking and filtering, which existing Singapore law allows.

But this does not mean we should feel grateful for the Bill. Adding a less repressive instrument to a government’s toolkit does not automatically produce less censorship or coercion.

Consider this analogy. If a country already has nuclear weapons, it would be foolish to encourage it to boost its conventional arsenal as well. The proliferation of small arms has cumulatively claimed more fatalities than the world’s fission and fusion weapons, precisely because handguns and rifles are more measured and calibrated—and therefore more readily triggered—than the nuclear option.

The analogy is extreme, but the same logic applies to POFMA. When comparing it with existing laws, it is not enough to measure their relative firepower. We also need to weigh the political and administrative costs of using them.

China-style blocking is so extreme that the Singapore government has, sensibly, never used it against good-faith news media and blogs. 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.

There is a second problem with the notion that calibrated coercion is necessarily better. We need to ask, better for whom?

Certainly, our media workers and media owners are spared the brutality that their peers face in some countries, and that is not a privilege to be scoffed at. When direct and violent repression is replaced with a system that encourages self-censorship, the media may even cease to feel like victims.

Yet, such a system is not victimless. Media freedom does not belong to media workers or media owners. It belongs to the public. Yes, the media could get comfortable with a regulatory system that is highly calibrated and measured. But when the media adapts to the new rules, the real loser would be a public that is not getting the fearless reporting and commentary it needs.

As for the Law Ministry’s assurance that POFMA “represents a shift in the Government’s approach, with the Government adopting a more measured and calibrated approach”, we can only wait and see.

The claim would be more persuasive if the government promised to review those other, more extreme laws. Or, at the very least, it should pledge that those who comply with POFMA correction and take-down orders will get immunity from more severe laws that could have been used.

I have made a similar suggestion regarding the correction powers in the Protection from Harassment Act. (See “Dreaded Defamation” in Singapore, Incomplete.) It would be a great step forward if compliance with such relatively painless directives provided protection from costly defamation suits.

Such arrangements are not without precedent. The Indonesian Press Council has a memorandum of understanding with the police, to the effect that if news reports are alleged to have violated ethical and possibly legal limits, and if the media concerned subject themselves to the Press Council’s independent self-regulatory mechanism, the police will not proceed with criminal investigations.

This is the kind of compromise that would truly represent a more measured and scoped-down approach to balancing media freedom with the need to protect society from its harms.

A 400-word version of this piece was offered to the Straits Times Forum page, but editors turned it down.

DEFENDING PSEUDO-FREEDOM

There are newspapers around the world that struggle for press freedom. There are others at the opposite end of the ideological spectrum, like China’s Global Times, that unapologetically serve as mouthpieces of the ruling party.

The Straits Times in Singapore is in neither category. It operates under laws that compel the press to align itself with the government, which is not its fault — but it tries to deny it. Instead of struggling to be free, it struggles to be seen as free.

In the past week, we saw two such cases.

First, Tommy Koh raised the seemingly obvious point that, in covering politically sensitive and controversial issues (in this case the debate on the income divide and a minimum wage) the press shows a bias for official positions, even if arguments are raised that any unfettered professional journalist would recognise as more newsworthy (in this case arguments by him).

Second, Yahoo! News made public what industry insiders have known for months: that one of ST’s most competent journalists, Li Xueying, was removed from her post as political editor because she was not trusted by some government leaders. Even as the paper should be gearing up for elections that may be called within a year, an already depleted political desk was absorbed into the general news desk, relegating its importance.

In both cases, ST’s official response was a stout defence of its professionalism, as if its critics got it wrong and don’t understand how news organisations work.

Click the photo to download.

This is conformism and self-censorship at an advanced level, where gatekeepers do what’s required of the powers that be while insisting, maybe even believing, that they are acting independently.

And this is exactly what Lee Kuan Yew designed the press system to do. My 2012 book, Freedom from the Press, tried to explain how it works. I also talk about the press in chapter 20 of my 2017 volume, Singapore, Incomplete. I’m releasing that chapter for free here, in appreciation of Tommy Koh and other Singaporeans who still care about the quality of our journalism.

NO PLACE LIKE HOME?

A National University of Singapore department was impeded when it tried to organise a talk by me. It’s part of a standard screening process, I’m told.

It’s Friday 9 March. My calendar tells me I’m supposed to be delivering a lecture today at the National University of Singapore. The view from my window tells me I never left Hong Kong. My host was unable to go ahead with the event because official approval was not forthcoming — until 3pm today.

Although this turn of events has spared me a work trip I can do without, I wouldn’t be doing NUS any favours if I silently let the matter slide.

In December, the head of a research centre at NUS invited me to deliver a public lecture, as part of a series on the state of media in Asia. In 2015, he had accepted my invitation to speak at a conference I organised in Singapore, and I was happy to reciprocate.

We fixed the date — March 9. A couple of weeks later, I got this email: “Rest assured that your visit in March is being co-ordinated.” My suspicions were aroused by this assurance, since I’d not expressed any impatience. Was there some hitch, I now wondered. Sure enough, in mid-February, I was informed that “all visitors to the Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences [FASS] are subject to screening”.

A few days later, my host apologised for the hold-up. I could sense his frustration and helplessness. We agreed to wait and see.

A few days ago, he was forced to ask for a rain check, since there was no longer time to make my travel arrangements or publicise the talk even if suddenly we got the green light.

This afternoon, approval finally came, like the punchline to a bad joke.

No explanation was offered for the nature of the screening or why it had taken so long.

In my time as an academic, I have given talks on campuses in around 25 countries. This is the first time that an invitation to speak has been, in effect, voided. It’s the kind of hitch that I’m mentally prepared for if I need to deal with universities in the People’s Republic of China. I wasn’t expecting it from my own country. I wonder if we’ve hit a new low (and new heights of irony), when the NUS Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, in which foreigners occupy half the head-of-department positions, can’t freely decide to have a Singapore citizen visit for a couple of hours to share his research.

I’ve been in this business long enough to know that, at this point in my story, two separate groups of readers will roll their eyes, for very different reasons. At one end of the spectrum are conservatives who have indestructible faith in our System. [1] The System, they’d suggest, must have good reasons for vetting academic talks.

At the other end of the spectrum are the cynics who’d laugh that I should have seen this coming, since Singapore’s totalitarian tendencies are well known. People would have to be daft to expect NUS to demonstrate any academic freedom, least of all toward someone known to be a critic of the government, they’d say.

Neither of these views is well founded, but I will address them seriously because they are both common obstacles to a productive debate about public discourse in Singapore.

First, though, I should share more details about the aborted event. Here are its title and abstract:

Rethinking censorship in an age of authoritarian resilience 

Most discussions of media freedom implicitly contrast it to totalitarian control. While it is commonsensical to think of freedom as the opposite of tyranny, this binary model does not help us understand how modern authoritarian regimes sustain themselves. Drawing examples mainly from Asia, including Singapore [3], this presentation considers how media policies contribute to authoritarian resilience. Although not averse to exercising repression, these states also understand that maximum coercion is not optimal. They apply differential levels of censorship, allowing selective pluralisation to enhance their legitimacy among publics and co-opt large segments of the media industry, while stifling media and communication that would potentially challenge their political dominance.

The lecture was to be based on three forthcoming publications, ranging from 6,000–9,000 words each:

• “Journalism and Authoritarian Resilience”, in The Handbook of Journalism Studies, 2^nd edition, edited by Karin Wahl-Jorgensen and Thomas Hanitzsch (Routledge).
• “Journalism, Censorship, and Press Freedom”, in The Handbooks of Communication Science: Journalism, edited by Tim P. Vos (De Gruyter Mouton).
• “Asian Journalism”, in The International Encyclopedia of Journalism Studies, edited by Tim P. Vos, Folker Hanusch, Margaretha Geertsema-Sligh, Annika Sehl, and Dimitra Dimitrakopoulou (International Communication Association & Wiley).

I should draw attention to the fact that all three manuscripts are being published in so-called handbooks/encyclopedias in my field. Such books have a distinct place in academic publishing. Unlike academic journals, they are not a venue for surfacing contentious new findings or avant-garde ideas. Instead, their editors invite experts to provide authoritative overviews of particular topics and to help shape the agenda for future scholarship. So, when a university impedes the presentation of such material, it’s not weeding out fringe theories (not that it should even do that) — it’s basically obstructing the main currents of that field.

Of course, the System is not obliged to put any academic work on a pedestal. But then academic events, like the one my host was planning, don’t do that either. They are not convened to endorse the presented research as Truth that is above criticism, but quite the opposite — to invite scrutiny and challenge. Repeating cycles of peer review are the lifeblood of scholarship. [3]

Having one’s work openly demolished with reasoned arguments is what scholars are prepared for. But it’s something else altogether to have to subject yourself to censors who get the final say on whether you can present your research or not, without needing to account for their verdicts. That’s the essence of an opaque screening process that is able to veto NUS faculty members’ decisions about whom to invite to speak at their events.

One would think that NUS professors, of all people, have earned some benefit of the doubt from the System. They have transformed the university into Asia’s number one. Even if we are skeptical about the details of university rankings, it’s quite clear that NUS is world-class. Indeed, there are few institutions of any kind in Singapore that have as strong a global reputation within their respective sectors. Universities are highly decentralised organisations, so NUS’s success could only have been achieved through the across-the-board excellence of its academics. It’s mystifying that its professors are not trusted to decide whom to invite as guest speakers.

Screening makes even less sense when we consider the quality of Singapore’s university students, who represent the top one-third in academic ability from an already-strong education system. Ten years’ experience teaching Singaporean undergrads tells me they need no shielding from the ideas of an academic like me; they are quite capable of making up their own minds. If the System does not share this confidence, I suspect it’s because its decision-makers are too distant from the young Singaporeans they are supposed to serve.

The above background should help answer the conservatives who are inclined to find excuses for the System. The only apparent benefit of a black-box screening process is to remind academics who’s boss. And since there are no explicit guidelines, staff are likely to second-guess the process by avoiding topics and speakers that may get caught in time-consuming red tape. Over time, a habit of self-censorship sets in.

None of this will be news to the other group of eye-rollers — the cynics who take it for granted that political control in Singapore is all-encompassing. The conservatives and the cynics may be at opposite ends of the ideological scale, but they are united in their indifference. When they hear people complain, both sides believe there is nothing remarkable to see here, and therefore nothing to say. But the cynics, like the conservatives, are wrong.

If social science and humanities departments in Singapore’s main university are required to have their academic visitors undergo non-academic vetting, yes, that’s certainly part of a larger pattern of control of our campuses (which we already know includes political screening of job applicants and disincentives for local scholarship), and part of an even larger culture that suppresses free thought through controls on media and public assembly. But it’s still important to register new data points that may reveal shifts in the political climate.

It is not true that academic events have always been subject to such vetting. I worked at NTU from 2004–2014 and never encountered any rule requiring us to seek permission before inviting a speaker. One of my colleagues had opposition politician J B Jeyaretnam speak in his media law class, for example. I asked a couple friends at NUS if they were familiar with the screening requirement that my talk had been subject to. They, like my host, were surprised to learn of it.

It’s equally untrue that this is simply the way Singapore is. Since moving to Hong Kong, I have flown back to deliver a keynote speech at a regional conference organised by the Institute of Policy Studies and sponsored by Temasek Foundation Connects, as well as seminars at the Singapore Institute of International Affairs and Singapore Management University. I’ve also spoken on panels organised by the Singapore Art Museum and ArtScience Museum. The treatment I’ve just received is not typical.

We know that there are sensitivities around foreign citizens being given a platform to talk about issues that the government deems controversial. The authorities equate such talks to foreign interference in Singapore’s domestic affairs. But this particular case does not fit that mould.

All said and done, like the conservatives and the cynics, I have no expectation that the System will feel any need to change course. I also know that most NUS faculty made their peace long ago with the way things are. Experience tells me that some will even apply their considerable intellect to finding creative justifications for the way the System works. Most will profess an understandable helplessness.

Having no illusions about the System’s inclination for self-reflection, I offer just one modest suggestion — that NUS make its policies more transparent.

Singapore’s academic community and its minders are free to develop their own norms regarding academic freedom. But why not have the courage of their convictions and openly declare the “standard procedure” (the term conveyed to me) that applies to visitors. Guest speakers should be informed at the outset that the invitation is subject to vetting that is outside the organiser’s control. They can then make an informed decision about whether to accept the invitation. Regardless of political orientation, surely we can agree that this is a professional courtesy that NUS owes to members of the global academic community.

UPDATES

Monday 12 March: I’ve been re-invited and have agreed to speak at NUS later this month. I was in two minds about whether to say yes, in case it’s seen as accepting of a process that treats Singaporeans this way. But I don’t doubt my host’s sincerity in inviting me. And, I’d like to believe that collegiality still has a place in academia.

Thursday 15 March: Subsequent media reports have quoted an NUS spokesman as expressing “regret” for the “unfortunate incident”, saying that “internal administrative processes took longer than expected due to an oversight”. NUS has not contradicted any part of the above article. (As some have asked, I should add that the spokesman’s statement to the press is the only communication I’ve seen from the NUS administration.) News reports have appeared in Singapore media (Channel NewsAsia, The Straits Times and Today) and Inside Higher Education.

Notes

[1] In this essay, I use the term “System” as shorthand for actors with the power to insert extraneous factors into the decision-making processes of formally autonomous institutions (such as universities and media), thus limiting their scope to act independently according to their professional norms and standards. The System’s actors may include top executives within the institution as well as government agencies and political masters. The System’s decisions are ultimately issued by the institution’s own administrators, and it is often difficult even for insiders to tell whether they have been explicitly prompted by government actors, or whether political priorities have been successfully internalised within the institution’s thinking such that no direct external intervention is required (resulting in “self-censorship”).

[2] My host had originally proposed that I speak about the Singapore media system. I said I’d prefer to go regional, in line with my current research: “Frankly I’m bored with talking about Singapore, since things don’t change much so I end up just repeating myself!”

[3] This is one reason why I welcomed the chance to present my research at a comprehensive university like NUS — to engage with scholars not just in my own field of communication, but also from its strong sociology and Asian studies departments, for example.

Those of us outside the establishment take it for granted that … organisations will invite us and then disinvite us.” – Me, in “Singapore, Incomplete”, page 99.

A SELFISH & IRRESPONSIBLE RIGHT?

Singapore Advocacy Awards Lecture, 4 July 2015.

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