As Singapore’s leading gender equality advocacy group, AWARE is strongly interested in ensuring space for, and promoting the quality of, public discussion. To achieve our mission, we address mindsets and practices that affect women’s rights, often through democratic engagement in the public square, via online media. The concerns of this Select Committee and the directions proposed by the Green Paper are therefore highly relevant to our work.

The Green Paper rightly highlights that “open” and “vigorous exchange” is vital to “the heart of democracy”. Experiences and views vary; even among people acting in good faith, how to characterise events and facts is contested. In a democracy, people understand matters by critically engaging a range of accounts, not relying on infallible authorities. Freedom of expression is constitutionally protected and restrictions should be strictly proportional to address clear and identifiable harms, judicially determined wherever possible.

The internet is young, but the dilemmas of free speech have been discussed in courts and legislatures for centuries. Nor is rapid mass communication new: a 1938 radio broadcast about an alien invasion paused to reassure worried listeners it was fictional. The Cold War era was marked by hostile foreign state propaganda: e.g. a Soviet campaign alleged that HIV was a US-engineered weapon. In Singapore, media licensing, advertising regulation, and laws on sedition, harassment, defamation and contempt of court, among others, have long grappled with balancing expression and harm.

While there is reasonable concern about how social media may shape media consumption, we argue for upstream education instead of downstream censorship wherever possible.

Read our submission in full here.