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Shanmugam said Singapore has laws and policies to prevent riots like the recent one in the UK as Singapore takes very strict measures on freedom of speech and prioritizes maintaining law and order. (ST, August 17, 2024)
He was referring to the unrest that broke out in large part because social media users fanned anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiment by speculating, in the absence of information from police, that the 17-year-old boy who stabbed the three girls to death was a Muslim immigrant (he was not).
He said that in Singapore, while freedom of speech is important, there is little tolerance for falsehoods, racial or religious hate speech, and speech that incites violence. In addition, people who organize protests may have good intentions, but these good intentions are often hijacked by people who want to cause violence. Therefore, a permit is required to maintain law and order.
The government’s job is to maintain law and order, and Mr Shanmugam cannot be faulted for doing his job zealously. But when it comes to clamping down on falsehoods and misinformation, he thinks he and the government know it all.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, many social media posts stating that mRNA vaccines are not effective in preventing infection, that they are dangerous, and that there are cheap and readily available alternative treatments to treat COVID-19 were censored. But now it has been proven that what they said was not without truth. By censoring these posts, the government denied itself and society part of the truth and was unable to make better decisions. Slightly off topic, isn’t there a correlation between the extremely high number of excess deaths we have now and the fact that we also have one of the highest rates of mRNA vaccination in the world?
The point is, no one is absolutely right. The truth is out there, represented by different viewpoints, even opposing viewpoints. Only through debate can we get a clearer picture of the truth.
As mentioned earlier, no one can fault Mr Shanmugam for his duties, but he needs to be more proactive, more ambitious and embark on a long-term endeavour, the end result of which is that we can all talk openly, even about sensitive topics, even about things that seem untrue, even in peaceful protests, without descending into chaos.
Maintaining law and order solely by imposing strict laws on freedom of speech is not only too low a threshold, but is also tantamount to throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Feng Ruifang
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