AFP/Singapore
A group of bloggers yesterday urged Singapore’s media regulator to rescind an order to shut down a website accused of fanning anti-foreigner sentiment, calling it a “brutal attempt at censorship”.
The Media Development Authority (MDA) on Sunday ordered Singaporean Yang Kaiheng, 26, and Japanese-Australian Ai Takagi, 22, to shut down The Real Singapore online forum (TRS), saying it threatened “public interest, public order and national harmony”.
The FreeMyInternet Movement —comprised of about 50 bloggers as well as the socio-political websites The Online Citizen and Temasek Review Emeritus — described the regulator’s ruling as “arbitrary”.
In a statement it said there were no clear guidelines from the media regulator regarding objectionable content, and called for MDA’s order against TRS to be “revoked immediately”.
It also questioned whether it would have been sufficient to ask the website operators to take down the specific articles rather than close the entire portal. Yang and Takagi are facing sedition charges for articles on the website deemed as fanning racial hatred and xenophobia in the labour-starved nation of 5.5mn people, 40% of them foreigners. The portal and its related social media accounts went offline late Sunday after the MDA’s order.
“As it is, we can only view MDA’s action against TRS as nothing short of a poorly conceived and brutal attempt at censorship,” the group said.
The media regulator said Sunday it had suspended Yang and Takagi’s “statutory class licence” to operate the website. It said the website “has deliberately fabricated articles and falsely attributed them to innocent parties”.
“TRS has also inserted falsehoods in articles that were either plagiarised from local news sources or sent in by contributors so as to make the articles more inflammatory,” the regulator said.
The bloggers’ group said that while not all of its members may agree with the website’s content or editorial direction, the reasons given were not enough to shut it down.
