Criticise PAP online?-Vivian:If need be, we can identif you
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Vivian Balakrishnan: If need be, we can identify you. If we have to, we will prosecute you.
SINGAPORE : The Singapore government has been embracing and even adopting new media for its work.
And while it is still some way from fully tapping the potential, the government said it will gradually evolve its policies with a light touch, as the Web2.0 revolution constantly throws up new challenges.
Singapore is the most wired city in the world. And according to a survey, young Singaporeans aged 15 to 24 spend an average of eight-and-a-half hours a day being connected.
And the government has been using new media outlets such as Facebook, YouTube and forums to hook up with citizens.
Another new media outlet is the OnePeople Portal.
The online resource on racial harmony was launched by the Community Development, Youth and Sports Minister Vivian Balakrishnan on Saturday.
While the government is gradually liberalising its approach towards online engagement with its citizens, the minister added that one has to be responsible and careful when posting their thoughts online.”
Dr Balakrishnan said: “Anonymity in cyberspace is an illusion. You will remember in 2007, we prosecuted three persons under the Sedition Act because of the blogs they put up which denigrated the religion of one of our communities in Singapore.
“The reason we did that was to send the message that your words have an impact; if need be, we can identify you, and if we have to, we will be prepared to prosecute you.”
But there are some challenges in the government’s use of new media to get public feedback.
Dr Milagros Rivera, member, Advisory Council on the Impact of New Media on Society (AIMS), said: “We expected people to give feedback. Nobody did. I think seven people posted comments on the AIMS website, and then the blogosphere went crazy with all kinds of comments and discussions about New Media.
“You can have a very nice welcoming website for the government to give feedback. If people are not comfortable they will just stay in their little forums and in their blogs and they will do their thing.”
And there is no doubt more challenges will crop up as cyberspace continues to evolve and change the way people communicate with one another. - CNA/ms
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If need be, we can identify you. If we have to, we will prosecute you.
Sounds fair enough, to identify extremist and criminals. Sort of protecting public from child porn people...
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TOC Chief Editor Choo Zheng Xi to set up panel to regulate cyberspace
By Eugene Yeo
We should have seen it coming. The PAP will not allow the strident criticisms and attacks on its leaders and policies to continue unabated in cyberspace for long.
Following the torrent of vitriol in cyberspace directed against PAP MP Seng Han Thong who was set upon fire by a 70 year old man which must have stunned the PAP, Rear-Admiral Lui Tuck Yew dropped a hint in Parliament of the government’s “disappointment” at the reaction from the ground which is a sign of further regulation to come.
Realizing the futility of pouring in state resources to patrol the internet, the PAP has resorted to making use of “credible bloggers” in cyberspace to disparage and discredit others who do not toe the official line.
One of them is of course the unofficial spokesperson for Singapore’s blogosphere, ex-YPAP leader and TOC Chief Editor Choo Zheng Xi. Whenever the state media needs to spin a tale about netizens, he will be there to speak out on our behalfs.
In an interview published on The Straits Times Insight on 21st February 2009 (read full article here), Choo mooted the idea of community moderation to rein in on wayward bloggers who dare to stand up to the establishment:
“Mr Choo, a law undergraduate, is currently working on an academic paper on community moderation. He hopes it will result in a possible working model, or at least advance the discussion. As a starting point, he is looking at self-moderation measures that are working in the real world. He hopes that at least one can be adapted for online use. One model he is considering is that of moderation by a panel of some sort.”
Community moderation is still regulation, albeit under a different guise. Given the spectacular failure of the Association of Bloggers, Choo will probably have to move cautiously with his “TOC panel of moderators” to entrap unsuspecting netizens.
While the size of TOC’s readership should give it a certain degree of clout over some bloggers, it is highly unlikely it will be able to extend its reach throughout the divisive cyberspace with its myriad of blogs and forums.
However, it will be a different story if TOC is targeting only a specific group of netizens to prevent them from falling under the influence of “radical” anti-establishment blogs like ours - politically neutral, apathetic and ignorant Singaporeans which form the bulk of internet users.
That’s where the ingenuity of the PAP lies. Instead of offending the entire online community by attempting to regulate their online speech, why not appoint a few “credible blogs” like TOC to do the “community moderation” for them ?
Since it can never win over the hard core PAP haters, it will be more prudent and wise to spend more time on the middle ground to win their support and trust to prevent them from joining the other camp. Their real motive lies in stemming the tide of anti-establishment sentiment in cyberspace and not to self-regulate online behavior.
TOC and the few other blogs on its panel will be constantly promoted by the state media as credible, objective and desirable blogs. In fact, it has already been doing so for the past few months. Without the Straits Times’ constant promotion of TOC and Choo week in and week out, it will not be able to reach out to a wider audience. Have you ever wondered why the TOC is the darling of the PAP mouthpiece and not more reputable bloggers like Mr Brown, Mr Wang and Mr Ng E Jay of sgpolitics.net ?
Official acknowledgement and recognition will make TOC more acceptable and appealing to “virgin” readers who seldom visit other blogs or forums and come to know about TOC only through the state media’s publicity. It will also create an erroneous perception in them that blogs which do not subscribe to TOC’s wishy-washy brand of gutter journalism to bootlick the establishment lack credibility and objectivity.
Of course we know that while TOC claims to be politically neutral, one of its writers have been making use of it as a platform to take cheap pot shots at worthy opposition parties and politicians while shamelessly marketing his own distorted version of a “constructive” opposition party that is compliant to the wishes of the PAP.
To quote from PAP MP Lee Bee Wah: “‘My view is that for the online media to be credible and attract readers (other than government critics), what is written has to be objective, accurate and not slanderous. So, some self-imposed ‘professional ethics’ is desired. Just like mainstream reporters, if what they are reporting is rubbish, they will find that the readership will drop.”
In spite of the mainstream media’s numerous attempts to protray us in a negative light, our readership has increased by leaps and bounds in the last few months and so clearly our criticism of the establishment has been “objective and accurate”. Since the state media has always alluded to TOC as a blog run with ”self-imposed professional ethics”, why hasn’t its readership increased by much in the same span of time ?
We will resist all efforts by TOC to set up a panel to regulate cyberspace with the tacit support of the PAP and we urge all netizens to expose their nefarious motives in order to preserve the last bastion of freedom in Singapore.
There is absolutely no need at all to set up a panel to regulate the new media. The onus should be on every individual netizen to take responsibility in what they post online. We do not need others to tell us what to say and what not to say.
If we have to keep looking over our backs before we post anything, it will create an unhealthy climate of self-censorship driven by an innate fear of running afoul of the rules set by the panel and being ostracized by our peers.
Nobody in this world can ever promise that every single word which comes out from his or her mouth is perfectly “objective, accurate and fair.” There will be times when we will make a mistake unintentionally in the heat of the moment, even in real life. (I am sure you will concur with me on this point, Mdm Lee Bee Wah)
Introspection is a human quality which all of us possess. When we look back and realize what we write is not appropriate, we can always make amends by apologizing and removing the offending posts. The aggrieved party should be gracious enough to accept the gesture and move on instead of regurgitating his/her plight non-stop to the state media like an old broken tape recorder.
My proposal to Choo is very simple and straightforward: do away with the panel, cut down on the crap, stop being a media slut, wake up from self-serving delusions of grandeur and stay out of the business of others.
One PAP is oppressive enough, we do not need another TOC panel to watch over us.
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On community moderation of internet content
Jeremy Au Yong cited some of my views in his Straits Times
article about how to moderate content on the internet [1] However, activist and blogger Alex Au and National University of Singapore (NUS) new media lecturer Lim Sun Sun both believe there are already shades of community moderation online and that the status quo is hard to change.
'Where this discussion is going to go wrong is if people approach (moderation) thinking of a single structure on top of a media platform,' says Mr Au. He does not believe there will ever be such a structure given the Internet's unbridled nature.
His take on community moderation is that it is the 'aggregate of all decisions' made by owners of forums and blogs who decide what content to put up. 'The only thing amenable to change is how the website owners go about their actions,' he argues.
[Then the article discussed Choo Zheng Xi's ideas for a superstructure, ombudsman or code of conduct.]
For Mr Au, something less formal might have value here. He is opposed to approaching community moderation as the idea of some formal superstructure sitting on top of the Web.
When he signed off on the community-moderation idea in the Bloggers 13 proposal, his idea was that it would take the form of a 'talk shop' - a place where bloggers and Web administrators come together to discuss the choices they make in moderating their own sites: 'What to allow, what not to allow, how much space to give to something, these are problems everyone faces. The talk shop would allow them to tap each other. The outcome would be intelligent, consistent moderation.'
I think I need to expand and explain what had been quoted. I basically said that even without a superstructure, moderation can be alive and well. The reason is that every website, whether a blog or a forum, has somebody in charge. He is not going to be absent, because maintaining these things takes work. But he's also human, and human beings are ultimately social animals. They tend to get into similar patterns of behaviour as others. This social instinct means their behaviour is amenable to change in ways they are not even conscious of. Or when they are, it is entirely voluntary.
The question then is how can we promote this possibility? One is through socialisation among owners of websites and producers of content. Which was why I mentioned a talk shop where people could tap each others' experience in handling issues or bounce ideas off each other.
In contrast, erecting a superstructure means that webmasters will see behaviour modification as an external force. It will be resisted.
But there is community moderation even nowI also said to the Straits Times that we can see moderation at work all the time -- if we know how to look. The problem is, the elephant (the government) comes into the room and tries to define what a moderated internet should look like: It has to be civil, it has to be "balanced", it must not contain "immoral" content and so on. Then everyone puts on his best Sherlock Holmes outfit and goes around with a magnifying glass looking for such a thing, only to find that it's not there. Together we then conclude that since the expected result is not evident, no moderation has taken place.
What a farce!
To me, moderation is evident even now, if only we know how to look for it. There are two kinds of moderation: post-publication and pre-publication.
Post-publication would include instances when either the webmaster or moderator intervenes or when other commentators criticise the viewpoint of the original writer or comment-maker.
A classic example would be when someone tries to cite religious scripture to support an argument. You can bet that lots of others would jump on him immediately. Singaporeans seem to recognise a norm that religiously-based arguments cannot be valid in public discourse.
This is not universally true, you know. In many societies with a majority belonging to the same religion, it is quite common for religious citations to be used and not objected to. For example, I have for some time been observing the discourse about homosexuality in Jamaica, one of the most violently homophobic countries on earth, and the typical argument used is a scriptural one. Even the pro-gay equality argument, on the rare occasions when it is surfaced, is sometimes scripture-based.
Pre-publication moderation is when the writer self-censors. It is much harder to spot. However, we can detect it at work by looking for pattern. Organic self-organisation is usually indicated by the presence of pattern.
One that is quite obvious is the almost dreary uniformity of viewpoint in the socio-political cyberspace of Singapore -– anti-elite, pro-opposition, and rather provincial. As Tan Tarn How, a media researcher with the Institute of Policy Studies, said recently, we don't see blogs taking strikingly different ideological viewpoints; we don't see pro-communist blogs, for example. Do people with pro-government views or unusual ideological stances censor themselves, and not even put up their arguments?
Related to the above is the narrow range of topics people discuss. We see cost-of-living issues, government mismanagement issues and the like, but we don't see much discussion of foreign policy, our attitudes to law and order, our drugs policy, capital punishment, public health, corporate behaviour, pollution and the environment, for example. Might it be that content producers, even if they are personally interested in these topics, have learnt that they get few readers (and therefore little gratification) if they write about such things?
(I am a bit of a masochist to write the recent long article about Asean [2], when I know full well it will get few eyeballs.)
In the same vein, might it not be true that people do hold themselves back before they say offensive things which they fear would not be well-received by others? That what offensive speech we currently see now is already a reduced amount, culled by self-censorship? Could it be that what is noteworthy is NOT how much offensive speech we see, but how little?
Coming back to the uniformity of viewpoints and topics, I find the above evidence of self-moderation, or self-censorship -- and you really can't separate one from the other -- somewhat disturbing. It begs the question: Is moderation/self-censorship necessarily a good thing? Does it not also drain vitality from public discourse? Is Singapore cyberspace too uniform, too boring, in terms of interests, viewpoints and writing styles?
But what sticks in the craw of the government is not that it is boring. What sticks is that it is not boring IN THE WAY THEY WOULD WANT IT. The interests are not focussed on the GDP and how to promote economic growth. The viewpoints are too oppositionist, and the style nowhere near deferential enough for their egos. And so the elephant says there is no moderation, and now we're all running around like clowns trying to create a superstructure.
Where moderation is neededWhile I have raised the question above as to whether the kind of moderation we currently see is always such a good thing, we should also ask: Is there such a thing as worthwhile moderation?
I guess a case can easily be made for moderation of speech that is malicious. Speech that is intended to inflict social and psychological injury upon a target person or group. If anyone goes about vilifying an ethnic group or bullying a fellow student, then reasonable people would consider this out of bounds.
The problem may be that Singaporeans don't know how to speak up against anti-social behaviour. It is not only in cyberspace, where we are tongue-tied or over-reticent. Singaporeans do not tick off the able-bodied person occupying a seat meant for the elderly or pregnant, they do not speak up when they see people not queuing up, or an abusive parent taking it out on a child.
It is a much more general problem than merely a cyberspace one. I describe us as a society that understands and is submissive to vertical authority, but has no clue about our responsibility to our peers. That, however, is for a separate article.
The point that I think we need to take away is that the more we rely on vertical authority to put things in order, the more negligent we are about horizontal responsibility. So, pace the headline used by Jeremy Au Yong in his article, and which, curiously, is taken from the words of the free-speech advocate Choo Zheng Xi of the Online Citizen -- "Moderate, so government can deregulate" -- the order should be the other way around: Deregulate, so people will see the need to moderate.
"New media" is really newWhere the whole discussion also falls off the tracks is the use of the word "media". We say "new media", "digital media" and so on, and unthinkingly class the internet alongside other "media" that come to mind, such as television, newspapers and cinema. We then start asking ourselves what models of moderation in these more familiar media can be replicated to serve new media.
Words are like blindfolds and we won't see where we're going if we do not critique the way we use and understand words.
The internet is different from the other "media" in a crucial way. While the rest are few to many -– that is, there are a relatively small number of TV stations, newspaper titles or film studios providing content for large numbers of information consumers -- the internet is many to many. There can be as many producers of content as there are consumers of it.
Even book publishing, which is characterised by millions of titles, is not as "many to many" as the internet.
"Few to many" media have choke points at which governments or public opinion can exercise influence. The few can be leaned on to abide by a code of conduct.
Imagine how difficult it will be to get the zillions of book authors and publishers to do the same. Now multiply that difficulty for a medium that is virtual, borderless, and which does not need editors, publishers or bookstores as intermediaries, and therefore do not have these chokepoints either.
You'd be dreaming if you thought that any model of regulation or moderation from the "few to many" media can be applied effectively to the internet. The starting conditions are just so vastly different.
Moreover, as Au Yong wrote in his report,
In a medium where freedom is everything, the thought of someone telling you what not to do is difficult to overcome. Netizens indeed seem particularly sensitive, and the slightest hint of control triggers a need to bite back.
Don't look at other media, look at the psychology of human behaviourSo we come back to the one sure thing we know: Content is created by humans. And humans are social animals. Popularity, peer acceptance and social esteem are perennial motivators. Thus, if we want to dwell on the topic of moderation -- and I am not sure I do -- then think along those lines.
Think also about the more general question: Why do Singaporeans neglect their horizontal responsibility to their peers? Is it, at source, a case of an over-controlling government creating a culture reliant only on vertical authority, such that individuals' sense of social responsibility has atrophied?
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They will chase people underground, using proxy servers. Worse, they might convert "internet activists" into "physical activists". They will chase people overseas....
BUT THEY WILL NEVER STOP PEOPLE SPEAKING OUT AGAINST ASSLICKING DOGS PROTECTING THE SENILE CURSED DESPOT AND IN SO DOING DESTROYING THE COUNTRY.
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Here's an idea.
IF THE FARKING DESPOTS START PERSECUTING PEOPLE EXPRESSING THEIR OPINIONS, IT WILL BE A WAY TO GET POLITICAL ASSYLUM.
Sick of this despot run country? Screw the despots online, get them to persecute you and you are on your way to a first world country!
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The PAP regime is hell bent on crushing all political activities, all disssent, all independent thoughts and opinions that are critical of them.
This type of regime I despise.
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Freedom comes at a heavy price, a price most people are not willing to pay. That is why I respect CSJ for his determination to bring change, stupid it may be but surely it has woken up senses of some Singaporeans.
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Freedom comes at a heavy price, a price most people are not willing to pay. That is why I respect CSJ for his determination to bring change, stupid it may be but surely it has woken up senses of some Singaporeans.
Looks like you will be voting for opposition in coming general elections.
You have my support.
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ya lah ya lah.. i know lah u can do anything if u wan lah.. u just cant find that joker who climb out from a toilet window lah...