Disinformation: a debate that needs to be better informed

Edited text of a talk at the Columbia Journalism School’s “Disinformation and Elections” conference, New York, 3 October 2019.

As a student in this room exactly 30 years ago, one of the counterintuitive lessons I recall learning is the need to turn away from the action when it’s captivating everyone else. My journalism teachers here taught me to be sceptical of the media circus. Good journalists and academic love to start the bandwagon rolling, but once it gets crowded, we know it’s time to jump off and gain some distance for a better view.

That’s exactly how I feel about the “fake news” hoopla, and I will close my remarks here today with some observations about the inadequacies of the global disinformation debate as I see it.

Singapore’s approach

The bulk of my presentation, though, will look at how the discussion has played out in Singapore, resulting in what is probably the world’s boldest and most elaborate purpose-built legislation against online disinformation since “fake news” was declared a global crisis in 2017. The law, which took effect yesterday, probably enjoys broad public support combined with a dose of blind faith in the government’s pure intentions.

I won’t have time to go deep into why I think the disinformation threat to Singapore – though it can’t be treated lightly – is overstated. I’ll only say that disinformation is not like some deadly toxin that causes harm to all people in all places and times. Its effects are highly contextual. Decades of research in India, for example, show quite conclusively that the transformation of inflammatory rumours into bloody riots is never automatic. It requires the mobilisation of an entire riot industry, including political orchestrators, grassroots instigators, and corrupt police.

Such factors are absent in Singapore, though you would not get that impression if you listened to ministers’ scaremongering speeches suggesting that only internet regulation could keep Indian- or Indonesian-style riots away from our shores. This was a classic case of the cultivation of moral panic. The law’s passage can also be seen as an example of legislative opportunism, riding on the global alarm about so-called fake news.

I’m not suggesting that the People’s Action Party (PAP) government was entirely insincere in attempting decisive intervention against disinformation. Think of how much mistrust and revulsion Facebook has generated even in liberal democracies, and then try to imagine how much deeper the genuine concern would be among paternalistic government leaders who never had much faith in the free marketplace of ideas in the first place.

What I am suggesting is that Singapore’s government has gone beyond what is necessary and proportionate to deal with disinformation campaigns by bad actors. It has given itself chilling new powers over professional news media and other good-faith communicators – who, according to all experts, should instead be empowered and enlisted to fight disinformation merchants’ pollution of the information environment.

Whether by accident or by design, the new legislation can be used and abused to restrict dissent. Called the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act (POFMA), the law empowers ministers to trigger take-down or correction orders against online material containing false statements of fact, as well as criminal prosecutions against offenders.

POFMA is remarkable for the degree of discretion it places in the hands of ministers, including the power to suppress and punish misinformation that ministers deem would damage confidence in their work. It is part of a long tradition of legislation that gives the executive branch enormous latitude to get its job done. This style of lawmaking is completely at odds with the liberal democratic tradition of limiting executive power through strong checks and balances, but it’s part of the formula behind Singapore’s much admired governance, so it is not surprising that most Singaporeans did not raise an eyebrow.

Western precedents?

Both the framing of the problem and the formulation of solutions made explicit reference to Western precedents. But the government picked and processed facts to build a case for a strong legislative response. Thus, the import of Western policy agendas and policy responses involved significant domestication.

The government correctly pointed out that even Western democracies had enacted or were considering new laws. What it overlooked was that the laws being rolled out in liberal democracies include built-in checks against government abuse — such as precise and narrow language—and in any case would operate within a constitutional system of limited government, with a tradition of courts blocking executive overreach, for example.

Germany’s Net Enforcement Act was frequently cited. Following the lead of credible news organisations including Reuters and the Washington Post, the Singapore government described the new German legislation as a fake news law.

But that’s not what it is. All the German law does is to impose additional obligations and higher penalties to make sure large internet platform companies comply with existing German laws against hate speech, for example. That’s why it’s called the Net Enforcement Act. This law does not create any new category of prohibited speech; it enforces existing offences more strictly. Since there is no pre-existing prohibition of falsehoods as such, the new law doesn’t cover it.

It’s certainly true that some of these new European laws have been criticised as unprecedented encroachments on freedom of expression—and indeed their constitutionality is expected to get challenged in court—but it’s important to appreciate that, at a global level, the encroachments are minuscule compared with the liberties that lawmakers are taking in illiberal democracies like Singapore.

POFMA’s problems

POFMA tilts the marketplace of ideas in favour of ruling party politicians.

First, POFMA conflates governmental interests with the wider public interest. The government has said that the Act’s powers can be triggered only if the falsehoods harm the public interest. The Act’s definition of the public interest, though, includes falsehoods deemed to diminish public confidence in the work of any government agency, regardless of whether that agency deserves high levels of public confidence, or whether the alleged falsehood is material to the thrust of the content that the government wants taken down.

Second, although correction orders may not sound unreasonable in principle—providing wronged parties with a right of reply—they may be difficult to implement in a way that satisfies the law. Furthermore, large platforms and media can be required to post correction notices on other media to make sure the message gets out. Presumably, a news site could be required to buy advertising space in Singapore’s national media to publicise the correction. This could be financially draining. The potentially high cost of compliance is likely to lead to self-censorship.

Third, POFMA can be triggered only by government ministers. Members of the public and opposition politicians cannot use the law to initiate corrections or take-down orders. In contrast, the new French law, for example, allows candidates of any party to get court orders against falsehoods targeting them during election campaigns.

Fourth, the government rejected calls for an independent or even arm’s-length regulator, which would have been in line with international best practice for media regulation. Instead, the new body that would issue correction and take-down orders must comply with ministers’ directions.

POFMA is thus designed as a tool for the exclusive use of government ministers. This is a concern because there is mounting evidence that the ruling party and its network are Singapore’s main users of computational propaganda methods, including influencers, trolls, and inauthentic accounts. Critics of the government—including, ironically, critics of POFMA when it was debated—have had their words twisted and their patriotism questioned by government ministers and other PAP parliamentarians. Their open vilification and dog whistles unleash online attacks by acolytes and other assorted trolls, in a style reminiscent of the intolerant populist movements overseas that are prime producers of toxic disinformation.

The Singapore government’s legislative response to the weaponisation of social media is, thus, less about demilitarising cyberspace and more about monopolising the means of discursive coercion.

Predictions

Since POFMA opened for business only yesterday, it is too early to tell what effect it will have.

I do not believe that we need to fear the worst-case scenarios—of mass arrests or large-scale take-downs—even though the language of the law may allow for it. This is partly because it is not the Singapore government’s style to fire off the full arsenal of legal weapons at its disposal. It has always been more calibrated and strategic in its use of coercion, which is a key reason why the regime has lasted as long as it has.

Furthermore, POFMA was striking for the degree of opposition it generated. Several groups expressed strong objections that the government could use the new law to shield itself from scrutiny. The government dismissed these doubts impatiently, but will now probably take care not to prove its critics right. At least initially, it will only use the law in slam-dunk cases of bad faith industrial scale disinformation.

My main fear is instead the indirect symbolic impact of POFMA. Liberal societies know that public discourse requires what American supreme court judges have called “breathing room”: you need to allow folks to get some things wrong if you want to benefit from what they might say right.

POFMA is the strongest signal yet from the Singapore government that the public sector need not give critics any such breathing room.

This will embolden officials to hit out at critics, continuing the recent trend towards more micromanaging of the news media, and rising intolerance of even mildly dissenting viewpoints. The government likes to say that critics must be open to criticism. What it doesn’t say is that its criticism of opponents does not stop there. In liberal democracies, political leaders’ verbal attacks on critics—think of Donald Trump’s repeated broadsides against “the lying New York Times”—have no real material consequences. In contrast, the Singapore government’s expressions of displeasure are backed by multiple and largely unaccountable forms of punishment.

These include limiting cultural workers’ access to the public sector’s sizeable largesse, blocking careers of journalists and academics working in Singaporean institutions, and withholding visas from non-citizen critics or the foreign spouses of local critics. The government is able to carry out such actions with impunity, not only because of a lack of transparency, but also because its populist nationalist rhetoric has convinced its base that the party’s interest is the public’s interests, and that criticism of the political leadership is anti-national.

During the parliamentary debate on POMFA in May, government ministers went out of their way to promise that they would not abuse the new law’s powers (though they could not deny that the law’s wording was open to abuse). But, away from the POFMA debate, it continued to send ominous signals of its rising intolerance of criticism. POFMA will be seen in that light. As a result, most journalists, academics and ordinary citizens are likely to engage in even more self-censorship than they currently exercise.

Talking about disinformation

I promised at the start to make some more general comments about the disinformation debate globally. Let me make three points.

First, while disinformation should be a shared global concern, it has different local characteristics. I say this because, as with so many other issues, US hegemony tends to turn the American agenda into the global agenda. Understandably, Americans are alarmed at how online disinformation threatens the integrity of elections here. Yes, this may also be a risk elsewhere. But we need to see it in proportion.

An objective risk assessment would have to conclude that disinformation put out by Big Tobacco in Asia—spreading doubt about the health risks of smoking—is several orders of magnitude more harmful than election propaganda. According to the World Health Organisation, around one-third of Chinese and one-quarter of Indonesians don’t know about the dangers of second-hand smoke. In contrast, populations with lower levels of socio-economic development such as Egypt and Bangladesh show awareness levels about tobacco risks of more than 90 percent, just like the developed West

The knowledge gap in Indonesia is actively perpetuated by an industry that is counting on such growth markets to compensate for declining sales in the West. Millions will certainly die and their dependents will suffer, but Indonesia’s anti-disinformation efforts are focused instead on the political arena, where the effects of fake news are nowhere near as certain.

Second, while the threat posed by digital media adds an unfamiliar and urgent dimension to the disinformation problem, another thing I learnt in journalism school was that we shouldn’t confuse the new and shiny with the important. Yes, Facebook deserves the public scrutiny and shaming they’ve been getting, and this shouldn’t let up. But there’s a danger that the debate about internet platforms is sucking all the oxygen from the room and distorting our perception of the problem.

For instance, it’s striking how current media coverage and policy debates have let one major industry laugh all the way to the bank—the marketing and public relations consultancies. We know from the Bell Pottinger case in South Africa that such consultants are deeply implicated in political disinformation. Yet the industry has hardly come under scrutiny. Jonathan Corpus Ong and his collaborators’ research on “Architects of Networked Disinformation” is one of the few serious investigations of the topic. In Singapore’s debate, PR and advertising barely figured, and the industry remains under-regulated by POFMA.

Third, partly because we are so wonderstruck by how new technologies enable viral propaganda, misleading memes and deep fakes, our discussions have tended to be supply-side and message-centric, leading to an emphasis on techno-legal regulatory fixes to sieve out or shoot down falsehoods.

What’s missing is a more holistic analysis that puts at least as much emphasis on the demand side: why is it that citizens who have more access to information and more freedom to express themselves than any generation in the history of human civilisation voluntarily opt for bad information over good, thus behaving counter to the liberal faith in the marketplace of ideas.

Many good minds have applied themselves to explaining this post-truth world, and the most persuasive answers tell us it’s something to do with the contradictions within our two-centuries-old formula for progress through capitalist accumulation, and its increasingly obvious failure to deliver social mobility with social justice. If political and media establishments have failed to use the Enlightenment values of progress through reason in inclusive ways, is it any wonder that the excluded are disillusioned, resentful and disbelieving.

For more on POFMA, visit Academia.SG.