"[2] Political and racially sensitive content is frequently censored in Singapore, resulting in a chilling effect on bloggers and academics active on social media.
[3][4][5] The early to mid-2000s saw the rising popularity of satire websites such as TalkingCock.com and blogs like YawningBread and mrbrown, which offered alternative perspectives on socio-political issues from government-friendly mainstream media.
[9][10] In 2012, blogger Alex Au was made by the Attorney General's Chambers and prime minister Lee Hsien Loong to remove his blog posts and apologise several times for various issues, including his questioning of the judicial sentencing of doctor Woffles Wu for a traffic offence, as well as his observations of the saga involving the sale of the ruling party's town councils' software to an IT firm.
[11][12] He was subsequently charged for scandalising the judiciary in 2015 for suggesting judicial partiality towards two constitutional challenges against the Singapore law criminalising sex between men in his blog posts.
"[16] The Sedition Act inherited from the colonial era is also used to charge internet users deemed to have promoted feelings of ill-will and hostility between different races or classes of the population of Singapore.
Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said the law was necessary to preserve Singapore's racial and religious harmony as ethnic tensions in South-east Asia may give rise to Islamic terrorism.
[22][23] In the same year, Singaporean cartoonist Leslie Chew was charged with sedition for alleging official discrimination against the Malay population, on his Facebook page Demon-cratic Singapore.
[25] In other incidents, teenagers and expatriates were arrested by the Singapore police over derogatory, offensive, abusive or threatening comments posted on social media.
[23][26][27] Academic Cherian George noted that in most cases, state action to prosecute individuals was instigated by complaints from members of the public, and the offensive content were spread further by those reporting the offence.
He argued that internet users should be able to partake in open debates and opinion leaders can make a collective stand against ideas contrary to Singaporean ethos, without the need for the government to intervene and censor or punish.
[30] The law came into effect on 2 October 2019, and a few days later, The Online Citizen editor Terry Xu wrote a Facebook post saying the ruling could use POFMA to suppress whistleblower complaints during an election.
[31] In 2013, Singapore enacted a law requiring licenses for news sites that report regularly on the country, a move that critics of the ruling People’s Action Party see as an attempt to silence online dissent.
The amendments allow copyright holders to apply for court injunctions, making it compulsory for internet service providers block access to websites that "flagrantly-infringe" intellectual property.
[44][45] In September 2022, the Asia Video Industry Association's Coalition Against Piracy (CAP) announced that it had obtained a court order on behalf of its members (including BBC Studios, Discovery Communications, La Liga, the Premier League, and TVB International), requiring 99 online domains to be blocked.
[46][47] In March 2024, it was reported that the Premier League had successfully obtained a court order requiring internet service providers in Singapore to block access to 25 websites that illegally stream football matches.