Dear Minister K Shanmugam,
Poor policies come with harsh criticisms, but the Singapore dictatorship government believe causation is correlation. You believe criticisms make a government policy poor, and hence you are stamping them out to make your policy look good.
Stuck in an echo chamber of the praises by Nazi-like supporters, the Singapore leadership is deluded into believing they are doing a fantastic work for the nation. Within the PAP regime, any negativity could be whitewashed into good news. Rising cost of living and having people pay more is good because it shows the country has become wealthier, having no money for retirement and working into their twilight years is good because it shows there is a healthy job market, taking away people’s HDB housing and inheritance wealth is good because others will have the land free up to purchase a new BTO, etc. You know, typical propaganda.
It is one thing to produce propaganda fake news to fool a population for your political gains, but it becomes dangerous when you start falling for your own lies. In all honesty, Lee Hsien Loong truly believes him being Prime Minister is the best thing ever happened to Singapore – as what his cronies and subordinates perpetually tell him. He is that deluded, you too I believe. Lee Hsien Loong and your fellow esteemed ministers believe that they will always be criticised no matter how good a job they are doing, and that criticisms are made by a vocal minority trying to forward a political agenda.
It is no surprise any writing the PAP dictatorship dislike becomes “fake news”, after all you have a dirty record of suing newspapers and critics for defamation in the Singapore court. Countless have been made bankrupt, fined or jailed for fighting government fake news. When the government says leasing is ownership, one will be arrested if he insists the Oxford dictionary’s definition is correct.
You, the entitled pricks who called yourselves “elites”, then realise that in this information age, articles widely read by Singaporeans but published overseas are out of their fiefdom’s jurisdiction.
States Times Review is obviously your target, for there is no single foreign or local media that could surpass your local mouthpiece Straits Times and generated an average of a million views from Singapore every month over the past 3 years. Your PAP dictatorship is furious about its editor hiding behind Australia’s press freedom to post inconvenient truths that would warrant a jail sentence if published locally. The problem comes when your realise you can never win in an Australian court to take down States Times Review, hence you are now coming out with new legislation to demand Facebook and Google do the dirty work.
Preceding the corrupted legislation is the demonising of your intended target. States Times Review is well-prepared for it, considering that I have “first-hand experience” witnessing my former fellow editors at The Real Singapore being publicly defamed for being money-grubbers. Unlike TRS and others who literally surrendered once they were singled out by the government, STR will hit back. If I were to be injudiciously labelled as a “fake news” producer and made to suffer its consequences, I will generate real fake news to attack the dictatorship. If you want “fake news”, I will give it to you. If you want to lay false charges of me creating “fake news” by creating countless anonymous accounts and create confusion to sway the general elections, I will do it. If you want for-profit fake news, I will gladly do it. I have after all the means and know-how.
Shutting down STR will lead to a real information war, I will make you face the real bogeyman you created. Be forewarned that it will no longer be a one-man operation, I will scale up, enlist whatever help I can get and fight.
Alex Tan
STR Editor