COMMENT: MDA registration — censorship or making legitimate?

Shah Salimat is the editor-in-chief of Popspoken, an entertainment, lifestyle and sociopolitical newsblog. He tweets at @shahsalimat. The views herein are his own.

It was to be expected.

The moment Mothership.sg scored a feature on national daily The Straits Times, its brand of humourous listicles and quirky personality profiles with a Buzzfeed-like sensibility had been given the seal of approval.

It also was the time when two things were established: the site was touching on key socio-political issues (no matter how funny the accompanying sarcasm was), and that it had a company behind it with a swanky office space in downtown Singapore and an investor to boot.

The Media Development Authority (MDA) did what any other governing body would do: tick the checklist and invite the Mothership team to register under the same class license that The Independent Singapore did and Breakfast Network did not.

After a trying year in which skeptics launched a #FreeMyInternet campaign to challenge a seeming government clampdown on the online news sphere and editor-turned-blogger Bertha Henson shut down her popular opinion website, one may be too quick to jump the gun and cry foul over MDA's latest call.

But, is registering really as bad as the activists claim?

Class license law excludes major online titles

Under the Broadcasting (Class License) Notification, MDA recognises Internet content providers as individuals providing any programme for business, political and religious purposes, and groups providing any programme at all through the Internet.

These parties must register if they are committed to "the propagation, promotion or discussion" of political issues and must comply with existing Singapore laws. MDA is allowed to determine the time period to register, specify the manner of registering and ask the licensee to produce records for investigations over licence breaches and alleged law violations.

What may seem contentious is MDA's right to ask a licensee to remove content if it is "against the public interest, public order or national harmony, or offends against good taste or decency". The wording sounds vague, but public sentiment seems heavy in this determinant. How fast must content be removed? It is not mentioned here.

Note this license was reviewed in June 2013, when the government introduced policies excluding websites reporting on Singapore news with more than 50,000 unique hits monthly from the class license. Many saw that as an attack towards Yahoo! Singapore, with blogger Alex Au crediting the move to a series of contentious articles the publication ran interviewing SMRT bus drivers from a recent strike.

So, this law is definitely not aimed at big titles. Do smaller publications have reason to worry?

Online sphere is still as critical about Singapore government

Since The Independent Singapore registered, it has not stopped being critical of the government. The publication ran an interview last December with the founder of now-defunct Sintercom who criticised the MDA registration as a "Damocles Sword" with heavy consequences masked under the "light touch" approach.

A scan through headlines at the publication reveal the sort of cryptic skepticism ("Govt audits: it's the same story every year") and downright criticism ("Productivity: still negative") that we see on other titles that run Singapore news with a more pointed perspective, even as political associations like The Online Citizen.

Things are still slightly sour over on Breakfast Network's end. Their Facebook page that MDA had asked to shut down is still running. Bertha Henson recently blogged that her move to close the company was so that "MDA didn’t need to exercise its regulatory powers; we saved MDA from looking like a bully."

But the focus was clear: this is a move to prevent foreign funds from influencing media companies writing on local politics. Even if MARUAH president Braema Mathi thinks that identifying every person who has given funding to these companies is "overly intrusive", shouldn't transparency be the driving force behind companies who want to report truths?

Media activists have fought a long war in Singapore -- just ask Cherian George. Have their skeptic ways and age-long battles blinded them to seeing a move like registering as one with many repercussions? Their worries may have truth. After all, a media regulatory body that belongs to the government will definitely have a vested interest to protect its higher-ups.

However, nothing has happened. Yet.

And until then, a site like Mothership.sg is now in an even better position, thanks to all this publicity and legitimism, to humour Singaporeans with reasons why we love hipster cafes and continue to bring daily summaries of top news and feature Singapore changemakers that the big titles may miss.

It is once a major clampdown does happen that we can really begin to question Singapore's media freedom.

Related posts:
Singapore news website Mothership.sg agrees to register under Broadcasting Act
Singapore opinion news site Breakfast Network to shut down
COMMENT: Can -- and should -- the internet be tamed in Singapore?