COMMENTARY: This General Election will be the most internet-reliant in the republic’s history. Voters should require parties and candidates pledge themselves to accountability, civility and transparency in the use of online tools.
- There is a risk that candidates and political parties would abuse online tools to deceive voters or result in highly polarising effects.
- Laws alone cannot ensure clean online campaigning.
- Instead of relying on state regulation, all political parties should voluntarily pledge themselves immediately to responsible online behaviour in this election and beyond.
This commentary first appeared on Academia.sg on June 29, 2020.
By Damien Chng, Chong Ja Ian, Cherian George, Howard lee, Netina Tan
This General Election will be the most internet-reliant in the republic’s history. It is also Singapore’s first since it became clear to the world that online tricks for manipulating public opinion have outstripped societies’ traditional defences against disinformation.
Many voters are by now on guard against “fake news”.
Vigilant netizens are active in pushing back against abuses of online freedoms. Nevertheless, we believe Singapore remains vulnerable to parties’ sophisticated and often invisible computational propaganda as well as cybertroopers — traditionally associated with authoritarian regimes such as China and Turkey.
Candidates and political parties involved in GE2020 should publicly commit to clean and fair online campaigning. Voters should hold to account those trying to benefit from the cynical and underhanded use of manipulative technologies.
Two risks are of concern.
First, there is the abuse of online tools to deceive voters by, for example, the use of bots to give voters a misleading picture about the state of public opinion.
Second, although polarising rhetoric has always featured in elections, digital techniques such as micro-targeting and profiling take this tendency to new extremes, with divisive effects that may long outlast the elections. Both risks were highlighted by government ministers in recent years, so we hope that the incumbent party as well as challengers disavow these campaign methods unequivocally.
Though produced for short-term electoral advantage, dirty tricks by combatants in positions of authority and influence will pollute the online and offline environment, risking irreversible damage to the polity. We already see this in a number of established democracies. As a country trying to strengthen democratic institutions and processes, Singapore can ill-afford such irresponsible politicking.
Most of what we know about practices in Singapore is anecdotal. However, systematic research in other countries alerts us to some of these threats. A global audit in 2018 found organised social media manipulation campaigns in 70 countries (Singapore was not studied).
The toolbox of digital techniques to manipulate public opinion and suppress dissent has been expanding rapidly. Although international headlines have focused on foreign interference in elections in developed democracies, researchers have found bots, trolls or cybertroopers being used by both ruling and opposition parties in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines — countries whose internet capacities and reach are less than Singapore’s.
Singapore has several statutes and regulations governing online content. However, these provide a false sense of security to voters expecting fair and honest online campaigning.
For example, correction and take-down orders under POFMA can only be triggered by senior civil servants designated by ministers, and not by opposition politicians. The anti-harassment law, POHA, criminalises doxxing and cyber-bullying, but much of the online abuse taking place during elections does not meet this legal threshold.
Besides, Singapore’s short campaign period makes it unlikely that police and courts can stop the dissemination of abusive content until after Polling Day, by which time the damage would have been done.
Singapore’s discussions about social media manipulation campaigns lag behind the times in key areas, such as data transparency, surveillance by cybertroopers, and the digital toolkits used by political parties’ hired digital consultancy companies.
We cannot discount the possibility that the consultants or cybertroopers here will behave as unscrupulously as Cambridge Analytica, to snoop, micro-target and insert dis/malinformation on social media platforms to influence voting behaviour.
Under current election rules, parties only need to present invoices to account for the amounts they spend on digital advertising. They are not required to disclose what their digital campaign team and digital consultancy firms actually do.
What kind of social media data are used? Are privacy cookies used to profile and segment voters? How is such data used to micro-target voters? When we go online as citizens, how do we know if we are participating in bona fide public opinion formation, or if we are being targeted by hidden influence operations and inauthentic behaviour?
The alarming truth of the matter is that we don’t know. In the case of the ruling party, it is also difficult to ascertain whether negative campaigning against the opposition could be facilitated by ethical lapses in how data are collected or shared between state institutions and digital platforms.
In this internet-dependent election, voters need trustworthy online content if they are to make informed choices.
Responding to this global problem, internet platforms have in recent years tried to deal with inauthentic behaviour. In Singapore, Facebook has started taking down problematic accounts ahead of Polling Day.
Twitter has taken steps globally to remove and disclose accounts linked to state-linked information operations, and to introduce labels to mark online falsehoods.
In principle, these initiatives are welcome, but they tend to lack transparency. There have been many reported cases globally of good-faith accounts being penalised even as extreme content continues to flourish.
Any attempt to tighten Singapore’s laws on online campaigning for future elections should take into account the need for credible and independent monitoring and enforcement.
Given the highly partisan and potentially divisive quality of elections, demonstrably independent electoral commissions are particularly useful. They can provide prompt but fair corrective action against behaviour that may undermine the political process.
Even then, other countries’ experiences show that laws alone cannot ensure clean online campaigning. Whether or not it is technically possible, surveilling and policing all political communication is not desirable. Messaging apps such as WhatsApp need to remain private, even though we know they have become campaign battlegrounds.
Factchecking initiatives and media and information literacy programmes can help make up for the limitations of law. These, however, are not sufficiently developed in Singapore to deal with the threats we foresee to the integrity of the July 10 election.
But instead of relying on state regulation, we hope that all political parties voluntarily pledge themselves immediately to responsible online behaviour in this election and beyond. Such pledges are not alien to democracies, even those that are more competitive.
Here are three commitments that political parties that are acting in good faith should not hesitate to adopt:
Authenticity: Reject the use of cybertroopers, fake accounts, social bots and micro-targeting designed to create a false impression of public opinion and tilt debates.
Civility: Abstain from abusive and manipulative communications, including messaging that pits people against one another; and repudiate errant followers.
Transparency: Disclose sponsor identity, service provider/vendor identity, amounts spent, and targeting criteria of all forms of political advertising on digital platforms.
We encourage parties to build on these basic commitments and brand themselves by their values, instead of racing to the gutter. Independent expert observers, social media watchdogs and other vigilant netizens are needed to monitor compliance. Their scrutiny can help discourage the covert use of online dirty tricks that the parties say they oppose.
Even if these promises may be violated with impunity, such public sign-posting of norms and values is an important part of a holistic response to online harms.
As George Yeo, one of the architect’s Singapore’s original “light touch” internet regulation framework, said of undesirable online content in 1999:
“You can’t stop it. But do you condone it? Do you sanction it? … In the end, you must still have a sense of what is right and wrong.”
About the authors: Damien Chng, Chong Ja Ian, Cherian George, Howard Lee and Netina Tan are researchers in the fields of media/internet studies, political science, and law.
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Top photo by Edwin Koo for Mothership