Views stay divided on POFMA five years on, but has it helped in tackling fake news?

As someone who routinely gets his source of daily news from social media, lead project engineer Haiqal Rafiee, 28, is very aware that fake news and online misinformation is a rampant problem that poses a danger to society if unchecked.
However, since the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act (POFMA) came into force on Oct 2 in 2019, Mr Haiqal has seen how POFMA directions have “clearly” been used to protect the public from falsehoods by setting the record straight. 
These directions typically compel creators of the falsehoods to add government correction notices.
He has also noticed that they often tended to target those affiliated with political parties that are not the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP), or media platforms and groups that are aligned to opposition causes, he said.
In this year alone, out of the 15 cases that involved the use of POFMA, 14 had targeted these groups or individuals.
Of the 14, nine were political party members or former members who had contested in elections against PAP.
The remaining case was a property agent who had made false and misleading statements regarding the public housing authority’s ethnic integration policy.
“When falsehoods exist in politics, it hurts the public interest,” he said. “No one would issue POFMA on a nobody like me, but POFMA holds (people in politics) to account for what they say.”
To him, the deleterious effects of fake news on society cannot be ignored. Yet, as to whether POFMA has achieved its aims, Mr Haiqal said that he was unsure.
“POFMA is meant to protect the public interest … but is seen (by some people) negatively as a political tool,” he said.
Mr Haiqal’s mixed view of POFMA was echoed by others during street interviews done over the past week to ask about their feelings towards it five years after it came into force.
When it was first introduced, Law and Home Minister K Shanmugam said in parliament that POFMA is not a political exercise, because there is “no political profit” in allowing online falsehoods to proliferate or damage the country’s “infrastructure of fact”. 
Rather, its objective is to maintain Singapore’s values and enable it to have a “set of honest debates” on policies based on a foundation of truth, he said in May 2019. 
In other words, POFMA safeguards honest and factual discourse by preventing falsehoods from distorting the facts, a point that a majority of those interviewed by CNA TODAY agreed with as well.
However, they had reservations about how it has been invoked by the government since its inception.
In a qualitative study carried out by the Institute of Policy Studies (IPS) in 2020, researchers picked out similar sentiments among 50 respondents who were categorised based on how savvy, disengaged, overconfident or diffident they are when consuming information. 
Among other things, respondents were asked about their views on policies and legislation related to information and speech regulation.
In response, many said that as the government’s lever to act against fake news and false information, POFMA has been effective in doing so.
Some said that the spread of false information “has been better” controlled, because it made people more cautious about what they share online — with one person stating that she tried to not forward too much information because she feared the consequences of POFMA and did not want to “get into any trouble with the law”.
In the same study, though, researchers also noted that a small number of respondents felt that POFMA was unnecessary due to existing laws to deal with problematic speech such as slander, defamation and sedition.
Those who were less trusting of the government felt that POFMA was motivated by a political agenda or could inhibit the freedom of expression.
One female respondent was quoted in the study as saying that the anti-fake news law “was a tool for the government to consolidate its power and stifle the spread of alternative views”.
Lead researcher Carol Soon told CNA TODAY that this part of her study explored “the diversity of perceptions and behaviour relating to online falsehoods”, but she qualified that it was not a representative sample size and thus cannot be indicative of how the larger population thinks.
On this, law lecturer and political observer Eugene Tan from the Singapore Management University (SMU) said that there will always be criticism of POFMA as a political tool, but such criticism “raises the game” required of the authorities in invoking the law in the first place.
Associate Professor Tan had testified during the select committee hearings to deliberate on the problem of fake news in 2018. This was before POFMA was introduced to parliament.
He added that the directions under POFMA must hold up to judicial scrutiny and, more importantly, largely prevail in the court of public opinion. 
“In this way, people may disagree with whether POFMA should be deployed in a case, but they will be less likely to see it as a political tool by the government to suppress dissent,” he said.
So far, the courts have only allowed one POFMA challenge involving the Singapore Democratic Party, while all other attempts at challenging POFMA orders have failed. Following the court’s judgment, a fresh correction direction was issued to the opposition party, which was unchallenged.
The Ministry of Law (MinLaw) told CNA TODAY: “The fact that POFMA orders are generally not challenged makes it clear that the people who have been issued with the orders knew that they were putting out falsehoods in the first place.
“The process for issuing POFMA orders is rigorous. If the case is not clear, we do not proceed.”
CNA TODAY has reached out to several recipients of past POFMA orders to talk about their experiences of being “Pofma’d”, a colloquial expression that has sprung up in recent years that means receiving a POFMA correction notice.
All those contacted declined to comment or did not respond to queries.
One person said that he preferred not to comment in order to “put this traumatic experience” behind him.
Responding to queries about the effectiveness of POFMA, MinLaw and the Ministry of Digital Development and Information (MDDI) highlighted the way that falsehoods have threatened social cohesion around the world.
In Western Europe, fake news is partly the reason why far-right movements have gained power. In America, falsehoods have become central to the entire political discourse and “facts are becoming less important to people now”. 
In Singapore, there were also falsehoods being perpetuated “for political profit”, about how the population will increase to nearly 10 million by 2030, as well all misinformation about the Housing and Development Board’s subsidies, its ethnic integration policy and other matters of public interest, the ministries said.
“We should not allow such falsehoods to anchor our public debates,” they added. “Singapore is a high-trust society, because the government deals in facts.”
They also said that if POFMA did not exist, the scale and scope of falsehoods would be “overwhelming”. During the pandemic, for instance, COVID-19 falsehoods would have taken hold with dire consequences were it not for POFMA, as these falsehoods could have been believed by a number of people — as it has happened in other countries.
“Falsehoods that are repeated often enough would be taken as truth, and Singaporeans would have been harmed by serious consequences.”
However, they stressed that POFMA is only a part of the overall system of laws, policies and efforts to have a safe, orderly and cohesive Singapore.
For example, recent riots in the United Kingdom from July to August, which were widely attributed to misinformation on social media about the fatal stabbing of three children in the northern English town of Southport, also came about due to other factors.
These include gaps in law enforcement, racial and religious hate speech, foreign interference, and dissatisfaction with immigration control.
“To prevent what you saw in the UK from happening here, you need an entire framework of laws and policies, underpinned by a strong commitment to addressing legitimate concerns of the people,” both ministries said.
“POFMA helps — but POFMA alone would not be enough to overcome governance shortfalls and social fault lines.”
Even though some segments of the population may question the need to have such a law as POFMA, the fact remains that fake news is a serious matter in many democracies and there must be a way for governments to act against this evolving scourge, several analysts said.
Dr Soon, who is also the principal research fellow at IPS, said that since 2019, perpetrators of fake news have become more sophisticated in their strategies to confuse and disrupt, and the falsehoods have also become more “insidious”.
After all, producers of misinformation and disinformation are no longer limited to notorious groups or partisan actors whom one might call out more easily.
Instead, social media influencers as well as bona fide professionals such as advertising and public relations practitioners have also been held responsible in recent years, Dr Soon noted.
For instance, during the 2019 mid-term elections in the Philippines, it was discovered that “micro-influencers” — social media personalities who lack mainstream fame — became purveyors of falsehoods during the polls in exchange for money. They were said to have reposted questionable articles or drew attention to propagandistic websites containing false information.
Dr Soon said these social media influencers would have a considerable size of loyal fans who would accept their claims with little or no scrutiny.
With the frontlines of the battle against falsehoods shifting towards more sophisticated methods such as deepfakes and algorithm-based personalised content, more needs to be done to counter them, the analysts said.
Dr Zhang Xue, a research fellow at the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies who studies misinformation and disinformation, noted how foreign interference and cross-boundary disinformation propaganda present increasing challenges as they are designed to be covert and difficult to trace.
This was why Singapore enacted a suite of other laws including the Foreign Interference (Countermeasures) Act.
Last month, it proposed a law to safeguard against deepfakes and other forms of digitally created or manipulated content during elections, Dr Zhang said.
Agreeing, Dr Soon said that POFMA was introduced before generative artificial intelligence became popular and deepfake technology was more accessible to the masses.
“The new (anti-deepfake) Bill … points to the inadequacy of POFMA in dealing with new forms of falsehoods like digitally manipulated content,” she added.
As technology evolves, more countries are recognising the necessity of such legislative levers against falsehoods, the analysts said.
When Singapore parliamentarians first debated the need for an anti-fake news law five years ago, there was already a precedent of such a law set in Germany, known as the Network Enforcement Act (NetzDG), or more popularly known as the Facebook Act.
In the midst of a global trend by regulators to act against fake news, hate speech and misinformation on social media platforms at the time, Germany passed NetzDG in 2017, and the law was often brought up during Singapore’s parliamentary select committee hearings in 2018.
Today, NetzDG has been superseded in Germany by the Digital Services Act of the European Union (EU), which also applies across the EU member states.
Likewise, POFMA was also mentioned elsewhere as the inspiration behind other laws to combat fake news. In 2019, Nigerian legislators came under fire in their own country for a draft law that was said to be “plagiarised” from Singapore’s POFMA, featuring similar legal wording but slightly edited to fit Nigeria’s context.
Other Asian countries such as Indonesia and Sri Lanka have also followed suit with their own laws in recent years. The analysts said that there was similar pushback from civil society in these jurisdictions over claims that they stifle freedom of expression, among others.   
Assoc Prof Tan from SMU said: “With the benefit of time, Singapore’s POFMA was and is clearly ahead of the legislative curve when compared to other jurisdictions.
“Other countries, including liberal democracies, have belatedly wised up to the problem of misinformation and disinformation, which has become a much bigger issue since (Singapore’s) select committee hearings.
“But the crucial difference is that many jurisdictions lack the political will or cleave excessively to freedom of speech at the expense of (protecting) society from such online harms.
“So, the harm grows but they lack the tools to deal with them.”
Since its inception, the pushback against POFMA from its critics has been about the government’s “selective enforcement” of the law on opposition figures and its “chilling effect” on academia, the media, as well as other forms of expression.   
Some critics also said that invoking POFMA in cases where the falsehoods have not become viral risked backfiring on the authorities, because the very act of issuing the directive would contribute to its spread. This phenomenon is known as the “Streisand effect”.
Responding to these critics, MinLaw and MDDI said that the law generally only applies when the comment “relates to public institutions or the discharge of some government function”.
“People often involved in such commentary are themselves people who are politicians or political commentators,” they added.
“There are many political parties and many politicians, but few have been issued with POFMA orders.”
The COVID-19 pandemic was an exception in that most POFMA orders issued were targeted at health-related falsehoods.
At its height between 2020 and the first quarter of 2023, there were 38 POFMA cases, of which 21 were related to COVID-19, statistics from the POFMA Office showed.
During that time, POFMA was also invoked in five cases during the 2020 General Election period from the issuance of the Writ (Jun 23, 2020) to the close of Polling Day (Jul 10, 2020).
Asked what goes on behind the scenes before issuing a POFMA, the ministries said that there is a rigorous process for each case to ensure that such decisions are justified and appropriate. A Cabinet minister then decides if POFMA ought to be invoked.
“This is not a decision that is taken lightly,” the ministries stressed.
During General Elections, when parliament is dissolved, senior civil servants such as permanent secretaries are appointed to make such decisions. They, not the ministers, decide if POFMA should be used during these periods.
As for whether the government considers the Streisand effect when issuing POFMA orders, the ministries said that the decision is not determined by whether a falsehood has reached a wide audience or not.
Instead, POFMA is used “on clean principles”. Action will be taken if the falsehood is assessed to affect the public interest, since falsehoods that are not addressed can have a “slow-drip effect” of being repeated over time, thus altering perceptions of the truth.
All things being considered, some analysts said that the authorities have to pay heed to how the public thinks of such laws, given that they are a part of the fight against fake news.
Of the six people interviewed on the street by CNA TODAY, none were clearly for or against POFMA. Most were like Mr Haiqal, who agreed that such a law is needed in principle, but the way it is used matters more.
Some offered nuanced views, such as scientist Justin Koh, 34, who said that his support for POFMA depended on the government of the day.
“POFMA is okay if I have faith in the government to do what is right to uphold the truth. But if I do not have faith in the government, then POFMA is a very bad law.”
Others felt strongly that POFMA works because there are people who might not be so savvy in verifying fact from fiction, and they rely on the authorities to act “paternally” to correct the untruths. However, fitness trainer Shawn Liew, 27, said that such an authority should be apolitical and independent.
A dentist in his 30s who wanted to be known only as Dr Tan was of the view that there were limits to what the law can do.
He said that there are many instances of geopolitical fake news from foreign media that goes uncorrected, even though these have a significant influence on how Singaporeans think about global affairs. To him, it shows how ineffective POFMA is in safeguarding public discussions from falsehoods.
To understand how people feel about the fake news law, Dr Zhang said that a longitudinal study needs to be done to find out whether public perception has changed towards POFMA since it came into effect.
“Public perception of POFMA is important because it directly influences how effectively the law can achieve its intended purposes.
“If the public perceives POFMA favourably, they will be more likely to believe the corrections instead of the falsehoods,” Dr Zhang added.