Election Misinformation and Foreign Interference: What to Watch For Around Elections

If you see a video of a politician saying something outrageous right now, do not share it. Do not forward it. Do not even pause to wonder. The most effective election misinformation is cheap, distributed by ordinary people who believe they are helping, and it targets your trust in the process itself. The common wrong assumption is that you need to be a tech expert to spot it, or that the only real threat is a foreign state hacking a vote-counting machine. The truth is more mundane and more dangerous. Singapore's legal framework, chiefly the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act (POFMA) and the Foreign Interference (Countermeasures) Act (FICA), exists because the threat is not to the machinery but to your ability to make an informed, unmanipulated choice. Here is what specific false or manipulated material to look for during an election period, how those two laws apply, and what to do the moment you suspect you have been shown a lie.

FICA Singapore election falsehoods are not a different category of lie; they are lies told by a specific kind of liar. The Foreign Interference (Countermeasures) Act, which commenced on 7 July 2022, targets communications activity undertaken on behalf of a foreign principal, where that activity is directed at influencing Singapore's politics.

How FICA Powers Sharpen During An Election

During an election period, defined under FICA as the time from the writ of election to the close of polling, the Act's powers sharpen. The government can issue account restriction directions, content removal directions, and service restriction directions against accounts or material involved in hostile information campaigns. A hostile information campaign is coordinated online activity by or on behalf of a foreign principal to influence Singapore politics. The key word is coordinated. A single angry post by a foreigner is not FICA's target. A network of fake accounts pushing the same narrative is exactly what the Act is built to dismantle.

Obligations And Penalties

FICA also obliges politically significant persons to disclose foreign affiliations and reports donations of SGD 10,000 or more from foreign sources. It prohibits them from accepting foreign volunteers for election activities or holding membership in foreign political organisations. If a foreign principal is caught interfering in elections, the penalty under Section 17 is imprisonment up to seven years, a fine up to SGD 50,000, or both. That is a serious consequence, and the Act is enforced seriously.

Spotting election disinformation is not about memorising a list of known false claims. The claims change faster than any list can. Learn the four tells that almost every piece of election disinformation shares, whether it originates from a foreign actor or a domestic prankster.

Manipulated Media Of Politicians

First, a deepfake or cheapfake video of a politician. A deepfake is AI-generated synthetic media showing a person saying or doing something they never did. A cheapfake is a cruder edit: a video slowed down to make someone look drunk, or a speech cut to remove context. The Penal Code's Section 377BD already criminalises the distribution of intimate deepfakes without consent. POFMA covers manipulated media as a falsehood if it misrepresents facts.

Inauthentic Coordinated Behaviour

Second, inauthentic coordinated behaviour: a bot network or a set of sock puppet accounts that repost the same narrative within minutes. Check the accounts yourself. Do they have a history, a real face, a follower count that matches their engagement?

False Voting Procedure Claims

Third, false claims about voting procedures: messages telling you that you need to print a form, that you must vote by a certain earlier hour, or that your polling station has changed. Check the official Elections Department Singapore website. If it is not there, it is false.

Fabricated Official Statements

Fourth, narratives attributed to a named official that the official never said. The easiest lie to believe is one that sounds exactly like what that person would say. The tell is that no primary source exists. If you cannot find the quote from the actual person or the official government portal Factually at gov.sg/factually, treat it as unverified until you can.

A POFMA election correction direction is not a takedown order and it is not a criminal conviction. The Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act 2019, Chapter 240A, which commenced on 2 October 2019, gives ministers the power to order a person or an online platform to publish a correction notice next to the false statement. The notice must say that the statement is false and must link to the government's clarification.

Election Period Speed

During an election period, the minister can issue a direction without the usual 24-hour notice period. The speed of a falsehood's spread matters more than the speed of a normal legal process. The person who receives the direction must comply or face penalties. For an inauthentic account, the maximum is imprisonment for five years, a fine up to SGD 50,000, or both. But the direction itself is not a verdict of guilt. It is an administrative order that the person can appeal to the High Court within 14 days of its issuance. The appeal is a full hearing on the merits.

What The Direction Does Not Do

A correction direction does not remove the original falsehood from the internet. It forces the insertion of a rebuttal next to it. The logic is that a reader who sees the correction is better off than a reader who never saw the falsehood at all, because the correction builds the reader's own skill at spotting the next one. That logic is debatable, but the mechanism is what the law says.

Foreign interference in Singapore elections, in one sentence: it is a foreign principal using online tools to change how you vote or whether you vote at all. The Foreign Interference (Countermeasures) Act is the primary legal weapon against it, and the Internal Security Department is the reporting body. The ISD publishes an annual public report, the Singapore Terrorism Threat Assessment Report, which has covered foreign interference attempts in past elections, including during the 2020 general election.

The Method: Build Trust, Then Pivot

The method is almost always inauthentic coordinated behaviour. A network of accounts poses as Singaporeans, shares local news and local jokes to build credibility, and then pivots to election material in the final weeks. They amplify a falsehood until it appears to be a genuine grassroots concern. The tell is the coordination. The accounts post within seconds of each other, use the same hashtags, and share the same article that no mainstream source has covered. FICA's election period provisions allow for enhanced monitoring of online communications activity. The authorities are watching for exactly this pattern. If you see a sudden wave of identical messaging about a politician or a policy, and the accounts pushing it have no personal history, do not share it. Report it to the police or to the platform. Do not give it your reach.

A deepfake of a politician is the video equivalent of a forged signature. It is synthetic media that places a face and voice into a scene they never occupied. The technology has dropped in cost. A convincing video can be made with a laptop and a few hours of source footage. The bar for believing any video of a politician saying something outrageous must now be higher than the bar for doubting it. A cheapfake is the poorer cousin: no AI, just selective editing. But it can be just as damaging because it is harder to spot and easier to pass off as a leak.

The Law And The Practical Rule

Under FICA, digitally manipulated material that misrepresents a politician during an election period is prohibited outright. Under POFMA, the same material can be treated as a falsehood if it misrepresents facts. Under the Penal Code, intimate deepfakes are a separate crime. The practical rule for a voter is simple. Before you share a video of a politician, ask whether you have seen the unedited source. If you have not, do the lateral reading. Open a new tab, search the person's name, and check whether the official campaign account or a credible news outlet has addressed it. If you cannot verify it, treat it as unverified, and do not forward it. The cost of being wrong is not embarrassment. It is that you have become the vector for the manipulation.

Fact-checking like a journalist is not a mystery. It is a habit of lateral reading. Lateral reading means opening a new tab to check the source and the claims of an article, rather than staying on the page in front of you and judging it by its own design.

Where To Check

When you see a claim about a politician, open a new tab and search the exact phrase in quotation marks. If the claim is true, you will find it on a primary source or a credible news outlet within the first few results. If the claim is false, you will likely find a fact-check. Singapore's main fact-checking effort is Factually, run by the government, and independent outlets like CheckMate, which is a project of the AFP news agency. Both are searchable.

What Makes A Fact-Check Trustworthy

The question to ask is not merely whether the claim is true but whether the source is transparent. Does the fact-checker name the original source of the claim, show the evidence chain, and provide a verdict that is specific enough to act on? A fact-check without evidence is a guess. The International Fact-Checking Network code requires transparency about sources and methods, and both Factually and CheckMate meet that standard. When a POFMA correction direction is issued, it is not the same as a fact-check; it is a legal order. But the practical effect for the reader is similar: a statement has been tested against the evidence and found wanting. The habit to build is to test before you trust, not to trust a source because it agrees with you.

The forwarded-as-received message is the workhorse of election misinformation in Singapore. Understand exactly why it is so effective. The message arrives on WhatsApp or Telegram with no link, no citation, and a claim outrageous enough to be worth sharing. It says something like 'IMPORTANT: bring your NRIC to the polling station or you cannot vote' or 'Confirmed: the government is moving the election to a Tuesday.' The sender is not a bot. It is your uncle, who got it from his golfing friend, who got it from a group chat, who got it from a page that does not exist anymore.

Source Confusion

The reason the message spreads is source confusion. Your uncle is a trusted source, so the message must be true. But the message is the source, and your uncle is merely the courier. The habit to break is to check the claim before forwarding, not to check the sender. Open a new tab and search the claim. If it concerns voting procedure, check the Elections Department Singapore website. If it concerns a politician, check the official campaign or Factually. If it concerns a government policy, check gov.sg. If you cannot verify it in sixty seconds, do not forward it. The message will still be there in an hour if it is true. If it is false, you have saved your uncle's reputation and your own.

Election advertising online is where the law catches up with the technology, and Singapore's rules are stricter than most. The Parliamentary Elections Act and the Presidential Elections Act define election advertising as any material that promotes or opposes a party or person, published on the internet. That includes paid posts. It also includes organic posts by parties and their members, because the definition is about material, not payment. The Elections Department Singapore is the regulatory body, and it is a unit of the Prime Minister's Office.

Funding Rules And Spending Limits

During an election period, which runs from nomination day to polling day, the rules tighten. Foreign funding for election advertising is prohibited outright. A person cannot accept a donation from a foreign source, and an anonymous donation is also barred. The penalty for an anonymous donation is a fine up to SGD 2,000, imprisonment up to six months, or both. The expense limit per person in the 2020 general election was SGD 4.00 per voter in the constituency, though that figure is revised for each election.

Platform Transparency

The online advertising platforms that carry political ads are designated under POFMA as digital advertising intermediaries. They must keep records of political advertisements, disclose them to authorities, and publish an annual transparency report. The report must list the number of political ads, the spend, the targeting criteria, and the payer's identity. It must be public and searchable. The minimum spend threshold for an ad to be reported is SGD 100. If you see an election ad online, check the platform's library to see who paid for it and what other ads they ran.

The cooling-off period is the day before polling day. The blackout is the rule that no election advertising can be published or broadcast on that day, nor on polling day itself until the polls close. The idea is to give voters a day to reflect without the noise of new campaign material. It is a rare moment in the election cycle when your feed should go quiet. If it does not, if you see a sudden burst of new campaign material on cooling-off day, that material may be illegal. The ban applies to publishing new ads. It also applies to republishing old ones if the republishing constitutes a fresh promotion. If you see something that looks like an election ad during the blackout, report it to the Elections Department.

Penalties And Defences

The penalty for a false statement about a person under Section 61A of the Parliamentary Elections Act is a fine up to SGD 5,000, imprisonment up to five years, or both. The defence is that the person believed the statement to be true on reasonable grounds. That defence is a low bar, but it is not a free pass. The standard is what a reasonable person would have believed, not what the defendant wanted to believe. The blackout period is also protected by FICA's election period provisions, which allow the authorities to monitor for foreign interference attempts that might exploit the silence.

What to do when you spot it is a set of steps that take under two minutes. First, do not share it. The single most effective thing you can do to stop misinformation is to refuse to be its vector. Second, open a new tab and search the claim. Check the Factually portal at gov.sg/factually, and check a fact-checking site like CheckMate. Third, check whether a POFMA correction direction has been issued against the claim. The government publishes these. A correction direction is a strong signal that the claim is false, though the absence of a direction does not mean the claim is true. Fourth, if the material is a video, check whether it is a deepfake or a cheapfake by looking for a second source. Fifth, if you have verified that the material is false and it is potentially criminal, for example, a fake statement about a person's criminal record, report it to the police. You can also report it to the platform, which has its own terms-of-service rules against misinformation. Platform reporting is a slower process and does not trigger legal consequences. The distinction matters: platform reporting is content moderation under the platform's rules. A police report is a legal step.

The failure case is when you have followed every step and the misinformation is still spreading, or when the correction itself is suspect. You have searched Factually; nothing there. You have checked CheckMate; no article. You have seen a POFMA correction direction, but you do not trust the government anyway, so the correction has no effect on your belief. This is the moment when the normal route is closed, and you need a different path.

Ask A Different Question

The path is to ask a different question. Instead of asking 'What is the truth?' ask 'Who is the source, and what do they gain from me believing this?' A claim that benefits a foreign adversary is more likely to be a foreign interference attempt. A claim that benefits a rival is more likely to be a domestic falsehood. A claim that benefits no one is more likely to be an honest mistake. If the source is a forwarded-as-received message with no link, no citation, and no named author, it is not a source. If the claim is about voting procedure, call the Elections Department directly and ask. If the claim is about a person, call their office and ask for a comment. The phone call is the ultimate lateral reading. It goes to the primary source, and it cannot be spoofed as easily as a web page. If the line is closed because it is 1 a.m., write down the claim, set it aside, and check again in the morning. A claim that cannot survive a night's sleep is not a claim that deserves your vote.

Not everyone who lands here should stay. If you are looking for political commentary, party endorsements, or activist calls to action, you are in the wrong place. This guide explains how to verify information and how Singapore's online material laws work. It does not campaign for or against any party or person. If you want to advocate for a cause, go to a political party or a civil society organisation. If you are outside Singapore and you are looking for general media literacy theory, this guide is too Singapore-specific; the laws it describes do not apply where you are. If you believe a crime has been committed, a fake statement about a person, an anonymous donation, a foreign interference attempt, this guide cannot help you beyond telling you to report it. Go directly to the Singapore Police Force, the POFMA Office, or the Personal Data Protection Commission, depending on the nature of the offence. The Personal Data Protection Act, which is enforced by the PDPC, covers the collection and use of personal data, and it has been used against organisations that misuse personal data in ways that affect elections. If your concern is privacy, that is the law you need. This guide is for one reader only: a voter in Singapore who wants to check the truth before casting a ballot.

The one habit that will protect you is not checking the facts. It is checking the source of the facts. The distinction is subtle but crucial. Checking the facts means asking 'Is this true?' and looking for a confirmation. Checking the source means asking 'Who is telling me this, and what do they want me to do?' A falsehood can be checked and found to be false. But a truth can also be weaponised: a true statement about a person's past, taken out of context, can be as damaging as a lie.

Ask The Strategic Question

The habit to build is to ask the source question first. When you open a forwarded message, ask: who wrote this, and why am I seeing it? When you see a video, ask: who filmed this, and what did they leave out? When you see a claim that confirms your deep belief, ask: who benefits if I believe this? The answer to that last question will often be: a foreign actor who wants to sow division, a rival campaign that wants to suppress the vote, or a prankster who wants to watch the chaos. The reason the question works is that it changes your stance from passive consumer to active investigator. You are no longer asking the content question 'Is it true?' but the strategic question 'What is this trying to make me do?' The answer to that question is almost always: make you vote against your own interest, or make you stay home. The best defence is not to be cleverer. It is to be slower. Slow down, ask the question, and let the answer catch you up.

• POFMA commencement: 2 October 2019
• POFMA short form: Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act 2019 (Chapter 240A)
• POFMA correction directions issued since commencement: More than 110
• FICA commencement: 7 July 2022
• FICA short form: Foreign Interference (Countermeasures) Act
• FICA election period: Writ of election to close of polling
• FICA foreign interference penalty: Up to 7 years' imprisonment, fine up to SGD 50,000, or both
• POFMA non-compliance penalty (inauthentic accounts): Up to 5 years' imprisonment, fine up to SGD 50,000, or both
• POFMA appeal body: High Court, within 14 days of direction
• Deepfake criminalisation: Penal Code Section 377BD (intimate deepfakes)
• Election false statement penalty: Fine up to SGD 5,000, imprisonment up to 5 years, or both (Parliamentary Elections Act Section 61A)
• Election spending limit (2020 GE): SGD 4.00 per voter in constituency
• Election advertising transparency report threshold: SGD 100 per ad