Singapore passes law cracking down on online content in scams, malicious cyber activity
Singapore's parliament on Wednesday greenlit the latest of the country's suite of planned new legislation targeting online crimes, this time tackling the worsening scourge of digital scams that governments around the world have begun cracking down on.
Apart from scams, the Online Criminal Harms Bill also targets illicit activities such as terrorism, use of online platforms for drug trafficking and spread of exploitative or voyeuristic images.
The legislature, dominated by Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong's People's Action Party (PAP), passed the law by a voice vote, with no dissent recorded as the main opposition Workers' Party indicated it backed the law.
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The legislation follows the recent enactment of an anti-fake news law, legislation targeting foreign interference - including via digital platforms - and a separate online safety law passed last year. The government has said these new laws are necessary to tackle crime in the era of the internet and social media.
Given the PAP's legislative supermajority, the laws, starting with the anti-fake news law in 2019, have passed with relative ease despite some domestic critics' concern about the impact they may have on civil liberties.
In contrast, Western nations including Britain - which is currently deliberating the introduction of an online safety law - have had to water down their version of these laws to assuage rights proponents.
Josephine Teo, Singapore's Second Minister for Home Affairs, noted that Britain - along with the European Union, Germany and Australia - was among countries planning to introduce new laws targeting criminal harms online, adding that the plans served as "useful references".
"There is growing international consensus that new rules and levers are needed to combat criminal harms online. There is also growing recognition that proactive approaches are needed to prevent such harms, and that government efforts alone will not be enough," Teo said.
The new legislation grants authorities the power to issue social media platforms and internet service providers different types of directions.
This includes disabling directions that prevent offending posts or pages from reaching Singapore users, or account restriction orders that prevent offending accounts from interacting with local users.
A stop-communication direction will prevent a person from posting texts or images which, for instance, incite violence against people of a certain race.
On scams and so-called malicious cyber activities, the legislation gives the government powers to take pre-emptive measures.
Teo said "malicious actors" could create thousands of blank websites which could later be activated and exposed to the public within minutes. Law enforcement, therefore, had to be empowered to take pre-emptive actions such as blocking directions or orders for certain apps to be removed from app stores.
"Law enforcement would then be able to issue directions proactively, once such activities are detected, and even before an offence is committed," she said.
The new law overlaps with the Online Safety (Miscellaneous Amendments) Act passed last year, but covers a broader scope of online harms across platforms. The online safety law passed last October covers only social media platforms, while the new law covers all mediums of online communication.
Lawmakers from the PAP and the opposition raised concerns about the bill, including privacy safeguards and whether the latest developments in artificial intelligence (AI) made it harder for authorities to deal with scams - even with the new legal tools.
Pritam Singh, the Workers' Party's chief, suggested the rapid advancement of AI raised the prospect of a "far more intelligent scammer than before", adding that beyond legislation and enforcement agencies, the first line of defence had to be greater vigilance by the public in their online engagements.
Scam victims in Singapore lost a total of S$660.7 million (US$488.6 million) last year, up from S$632 million in 2021, the Straits Times previously reported. There were 31,728 scam cases reported in 2022 and 23,933 in 2021.
Queried by PAP MP Zhulkarnain bin Abdul Rahim on safeguards to protect users' privacy, Teo said the government sought to "strike an appropriate balance between preventing criminal harms and privacy".
"This bill will not require online companies to break end-to-end encryption in private messaging. However, to combat the crime, we can issue directions to the messaging platform to restrict accounts which are being used to commit the crime," she said.
On how free speech and legitimate content would be protected, Teo said the bill applied only to online content and activities that were already considered criminal offences, such as incitement to hatred against a religious group.
"This does not create any new criminal offences in respect of speech nor does it curtail legitimate content," she said.
Apart from the legislation greenlit on Wednesday, Singapore's next legislative lever targeting online activity may be the introduction of a so-called cancel culture law targeting campaigns against those who face coordinated online or offline vitriol for expressing legitimate views.
Officials have said they are studying the possibility of introducing such a law but have not indicated when this will take place.
This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).
Copyright (c) 2023. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
