In his contribution to the new volume Lee Hsien Loong and Singapore, CHERIAN GEORGE (Hong Kong Baptist University) assesses media regulation under the country’s second prime minister. This is the first half of his chapter, examining the government’s response to the proliferation of online voices. Part 2, which will be posted on this website next week, is devoted to the government’s management of the press.

Lee Hsien Loong’s two decades as prime minister of Singapore coincided with the rapid proliferation of Internet technologies. These revolutionised how citizens interacted with one another and with the state. They also disrupted the operations of news media organisations that had been the main interface between the people and government. Exhibiting a deep political conservatism that was a defining feature of his tenure, his government tried to maintain a tight grip on the public agenda even as its monopoly on the means of communication was fast eroding.

The first half of this article examines the government’s relationship with the born-digital online sites and social media platforms to which Singaporeans increasingly flocked to talk about public affairs. The second part analyses the national news organisations that remained the country’s main venue for daily reporting and commentary by full-time journalists.

Online space: Struggling to control the narrative

The World Wide Web reached Singapore in the early years of the Goh Chok Tong Government. Like many other states, Singapore settled on a dual regulatory regime. The colonial-era system of publishing permits and government ownership would continue to apply to print and broadcast media, respectively. But online media would be spared discretionary licensing. Regulators stated explicitly that there was no intention to ban political sites. Goh’s Government committed itself to merely “light-touch” regulation of the Internet. Bloggers were sceptical, but the government kept this light-touch promise for more than a decade (Lee, 2005; George, 2012).

The Lee Hsien Loong Government transformed the tone and substance of Internet regulation. By the midpoint of his tenure, the light-touch approach did not even merit lip service. Laws and regulations covering independent websites became more restrictive. In 2011, the Political Donations Act, which the government had touted as a means of protecting the integrity of elections, was used to constrain the development of Singapore’s most promising independent website, The Online Citizen. The authorities did this by declaring the media outlet a “political association” under the Act, thereby imposing restrictions on its fundraising.

Also in the early 2010s, individual leaders and the state started targeting Singaporean bloggers with legal weapons that had, in the past, been wielded against only large, and mostly foreign, news organisations. Blogger Alex Au took down a post and apologised when Lee threatened him with a defamation suit in 2013 (Tan, 2013). Around the same time, cartoonist Leslie Chew was investigated under the Sedition Act and then charged with contempt of court for some satirical strips in his online series, Demon-cratic Singapore; he was let off after apologising to the courts (Reuters, 2013).

The obvious reason for this shift was the vastly increased potency of the online space as a site for dissent. The Lee Hsien Loong era coincided with the normalisation of digital communication: the Internet went mobile via 3G in 2005; by 2011, half the population was on Facebook; by 2015, half the population was watching videos on YouTube. Online word of mouth became the main means of news dissemination. The Internet democratised the production, creative reconfiguration and mass distribution of not just text, but also video. Singapore’s regulatory approach in the early web era was “wait-and-see”. Lee’s Government had seen enough and felt it could no longer wait.

Global policy and intellectual fashions also shifted: in the 1990s and early 2000s, the Singapore Government needed to show investors it was open to new technology. But in the 2010s, concern mounted globally about online safety, hate and disinformation. The government could dial up political censorship with little reputational cost. Besides, as the Internet grew more technologically sophisticated and dominated by commercial platforms, it was no longer the great equaliser. Offline resources could create a competitive advantage online. Many high-capacity authoritarian governments realised they could go online and win (Morozov, 2012). Singapore was no exception — the government, ruling party and their supporters ramped up their online activity.

Much of this was innocuous and, indeed, welcome: government agencies vastly expanded their in-house capacity for online communication. They became major clients of the emerging industry of content creators, online influencers and professional social media consultants. Individual politicians took a similar path to sell not only their policies and constituency work, but also their personalities. Such efforts, which picked up after the 2011 General Election (GE), allowed the People’s Action Party (PAP) to win the competition for attention online, even if not as decisively as in offline media (Tan, 2020).

In 1995, information minister George Yeo told Parliament that opening the windows to the information revolution would allow flies to come in. The solution was not to close the windows but to “have many fly swatters at hand… to keep the flies off our plates”. The government initially pledged to regulate the cyberspace with a “light touch”, but it increasingly reached for fly swatters in the second half of Lee Hsien Loong’s tenure. [This digital artwork by GVBSONIC. Main artwork based on digital art by RALPH-GERMANY.]

Going on the offensive

More problematic was the authorities’ failure to restrain the dark side of pro-government computational propaganda. Bots, fake accounts, and cybertroops manipulated public opinion, while anonymously-run websites and Facebook pages instigated disinformation-fueled hate against dissenters and other opponents (Xu & Lee, 2014; Xavier, 2019).

Within this ecosystem, Ho Ching, chief executive of Temasek Holdings from 2004 to 2021, played a unique role. She frequently shared posts by pro-PAP provocateurs such as Critical Spectator (Romero, 2021; Xu, 2022; Wong, 2025), in effect providing high-level legitimation for the kind of polarising political rhetoric that the government claimed to be against. Other commentators suggested, to no avail, that as the wife of the PM, Ho Ching should exercise more prudence (Henson, 2021). A wider call by academics to political parties to rein in their agents and advise their supporters to post responsibly received no response from Lee’s party nor the other major parties (Chng et al., 2020).

The milestone 2018 Parliamentary Select Committee on Deliberate Online Falsehoods recommended full disclosure on the “sponsor identity, amounts spent, and targeting criteria of all forms of digital advertising,” with all such data made “publicly accessible” to “enable users to critically assess the information they access online”. The government did not implement this. Instead, the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act (POFMA) 2019 gives power to the government to extract data about other political actors’ online activities while exempting its own from public scrutiny. Only government ministers can trigger POFMA’s best-known provisions: correction and take-down notices. POFMA gives no protection to opposition politicians or civil society activists who may be victims of official misinformation (Cheung, 2021; Rajah, 2024).

POFMA was, at one level, a demonstration of the Lee Government’s regulatory power over online space. At another level, however, it was symptomatic of a long-term erosion of the PAP’s preferred model of media management. In the 1970s and 1980s, Lee Kuan Yew had steered media away from open confrontation with the government. He installed a model of media regulation that involved co-option of media elites, who were made to feel like partners in an enterprise that was reaping national as well as personal rewards (George, 2012).

This hegemonic system, which mostly relied on self-censorship by a manageable number of gatekeepers, was strained by the uncontrolled proliferation of online media producers. Towards the later part of the Lee Hsien Loong era, a tiny but growing number of activists schooled in civil disobedience were regularly drawing out the government’s irritable, bullying side. Activists such as Jolovan Wham, Kokila Annamalai, and the siblings Preeti and Subhas Nair chose to test and cross legal lines in their pursuit of social justice causes. They used ensuing police investigations to show that controls on peaceful political expression were unreasonable. To drive home this message, a few refused to pay fines and opted for jail time.

The Lee Government also could not stop the wider, tectonic shift in public discourse, which became more plural. Under the first two PMs, it was the government that set the agenda for mass communication. By the end of Lee’s premiership, it was more often playing catch up, having to react to the latest talking point taking a life of its own on social media. In the past, ministers could invoke Asian values to demand respect. By 2024, it was no longer remarkable to see Singaporeans, even without the shield of anonymity, taking to social media to call out a minister’s slip-up or an unpopular policy. While most would still stop short of, say, accusing a minister of corruption, their open criticism of the country’s leaders would have been unimaginable in an earlier age. For better or worse, the political culture had been transformed.

Part 2 will be posted next week.

– Cherian George is a professor of media and politics at Hong Kong Baptist University and an editor of AcademiaSG.

References

Cheung, A. Y. H. (2021). Legal gaslighting. University of Toronto Law Journal, 72(1). https://doi.org/10.3138/utlj-2020-0125

Chng, D., Chong, J. I., George, C., Lee, H., & Tan, N. (2020). Political parties must ACT now to assure voters of clean online campaigning. https://www.academia.sg/academic-views/clean-online-campaigning/

George, C. (2012). Freedom from the press: Journalism and state power in Singapore. NUS Press.

Henson, B. (2021, September 10). Facebook post. https://www.facebook.com/share/p/17dUKNedFS/

Lee, T. (2005). Internet control and auto-regulation in Singapore. Surveillance & Society, 3(1), 74–95.

Morozov, E. (2012). The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Inernet Freedom. Public Affairs.

Rajah, J. (2024). Authoritarian rule of law deploys political gaslighting: Singapore legislates against fake news. In M. Sevel (Ed.), Routledge handbook of the rule of law. Routledge.

Romero, A. M. (2021, June 28). Ho Ching called out for sharing a post of Critical Spectator blogger. The Independent. https://theindependent.sg/ho-ching-called-out-for-sharing-a-post-of-critical-spectator-blogger/

Wong, J. (2025). Influence or interference? Michael Petraeus and the operative boundaries of Singapore’s FICA. https://medium.com/sgdecoded/influence-or-interference-michael-petraeus-and-the-operative-boundaries-of-singapores-fica-6e722a4a84e0

Xu, T. (2022, November 27). Ho Ching goes “fangirl” over Critical Spectator, shares 21 articles and posts written by him in just over an hour. The Online Citizen. https://www.theonlinecitizen.com/2022/11/27/ho-ching-goes-fangirl-over-critical-spectator-shares-21-articles-and-posts-written-by-him-in-just-over-an-hour/

Tan, N. (2020). Digital learning and extending electoral authoritarianism in Singapore. Democratization, 27(6), 1073–1091. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/13510347.2020.1770731

Xavier, K. (2019, February 27). New politician on the block gets swarmed by IBs on CPF Post. The Online Citizen. https://www.theonlinecitizen.com/2019/02/27/new-politician-on-the-block-gets-swarmed-by-ibs-on-cpf-post  

Xu, T., & Lee, H. (2014, November 26). Where have all the IBs gone — Part 1: Evolution of PAP’s online counter-insurgency. The Online Citizen. https://www.theonlinecitizen.com/2014/11/26/where-have-all-the-ibs-gone-part-1-evolution-of-paps-online-counter-insurgency