Hello to new subscribers who signed up for We, The Citizens on the day of the Singapore Independent Media Fair (or shortly after)!
(1)
WTF is going on here?! For Racial Harmony Day, a student from Raffles Institution showed up wearing a mask a dark-skinned man while dressed in a foodpanda shirt. He's been disciplined, the school says. RI's principal said that he had "no intention to make fun of any group or community" and the photo had been taken "as part of current trends around social media memes involving a basketballer".
Bullshit.
I'm not interested in debating whether the kid was knowingly making a racist statement or just so wildly ignorant that he somehow didn't realise how racist it is to dress up in blackface and imply that a food delivery rider's uniform is an ethnic group's traditional dress. I'm more appalled by the cover he's getting from his school.
Intention is not the point here—oh he didn't mean it, he just thought it'd be funny to dress up as a delivery rider because the only minorities he meets are delivery riders and he was just trying to make a joke out of it is still fucked up—and that point about the basketballer doesn't even make any sense. In such a case of blatant racism, what does it mean that the students have been, per CNA's reporting, "counselled to remind them of the importance of being sensitive to the feelings of others, and to be mindful of their actions"? This is not about being sensitive to people's feelings, this is about being racist.
What does this—and a previous incident of RI students in blackface—tell us about the environment at RI and how adults, from parents to teachers and school administrators, are responding to racism and teaching kids? And, given RI's outsized influence on Singapore's political elite circle, what impact might this sort of failure to take firm stand on racism have on our social and political landscape as a whole?
(2)
The Ministry of Digital Development and Information says there's more bad stuff on social media these days. MDDI (previously the Ministry of Communications and Information) conducted a poll on online safety and found that 74% of the 2,000+ respondents had encountered harmful content, particularly cyberbullying and sexual content, online. But there was also a reported increase in encounters with violent content and stuff that incites racial or religious tensions.
If you're wondering what "harmful content" refers to, I fished this out of the Code of Practice for Online Safety: sexual content, violent content, suicide and self-harm content, cyberbullying content, content endangering public health, and content facilitating vice and organised crime. Looking though MDDI's press release, this CNA article and the Code of Practice for Online Safety, I've not (yet) been able to fine how "incites racial or religious tensions" is defined in the context of this poll. Are respondents just defining this for themselves, and if so, how do we take subjectivity into account? We're not new to anti-racist activism and criticism being treated as "inciting racial and religious tensions", so it'd be helpful to have more detail on the question.
The poll also found that most people who tried to report the harmful content to social media platforms ran into issues with the reporting process. No surprise there: it's a long-standing gripe that the big tech companies aren't great when it comes to content moderation and that their processes are often opaque and confusing. They're just not very good at dealing with the mess that they unleashed from Pandora's Box.
Over the years I've been reading books related to social media, digital rights, freedom of expression and censorship, so here are some titles I can recommend (obviously nowhere near a comprehensive list):
- Speech Police: The Global Struggle to Govern the Internet by David Kaye
- Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism by Jillian C. York
- How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future by Maria Ressa (which I reviewed for Mekong Review here)
- Burn Book: A Tech Love Story by Kara Swisher
It's clear that these big tech companies wield a mind-boggling amount of influence, and also that they have often not been responsible or accountable about this power. I don't think it's controversial to say that some regulation is necessary, but the key is really is what and how this is done, and also who is doing the regulating. This is where it gets knotty and messy. Even when talking about government regulation, there's a difference between laws and regulations implemented in democratic countries where there are checks and balances and independent institutions, versus in authoritarian states where those in power appoint themselves internet police. Also, the greater the failure of the tech companies to deal with the problems themselves, the more opening there is for authoritarian governments to claim that they have to step in with legislation that often turns out to be far more expansive than they should be (see: POFMA).
It's obviously bad if people are feeling unsafe online, or finding that the Internet is growing increasingly toxic. What we do about it, though, requires vigilance over power, media literacy, experience with negotiating conflict and more.
This MDDI survey wasn't immediately accompanied by government talking points about how new legislation will be required, although Josephine Teo did say that a code of practice for app stores is coming.
(3)
The WP/town council saga that has been going on for what feels like 20 million years has finally come to a close. The two town councils, Aljunied-Hougang Town Council and Sengkang Town Council, that sued the Workers' Party alleging that they'd misused town council funds have dropped their claims after all parties reached a settlement. All sides will pay their own legal costs. The Straits Times has a timeline here if you're in need of a recap. Now WP can put this case behind them and look ahead to focus on the next General Election, whenever that might be.
Except... there's still the charges of lying to the Committee of Privileges that Pritam Singh has to face.
