Ng Eng Hen, the Defence Minister, warned on Friday of a new 'threat' to Singapore's Total Defence. That is: distorted or false information, rumours and smear campaigns on the internet.
He was speaking at the Total Defence Symposium at the Ritz-Carlton Millenia Hotel.
He went on to explain that the misinformation is aimed at "weakening our resolve" and calculated to "cause disunity". He suggested that those who want to harm Singapore spread the misinformation during times of crisis when such information spreads rapidly and causes confusion and chaos.
Going on to talk about Singapore's Total Defence efforts, Dr Ng cited the 2003 SARS crisis and the recent Haze episode as examples where Singapore's Total Defence efforts have been working.
However, his remarks have drawn a lot of criticism from netizens. Some have commented that they don't know what Total Defence really is anymore, while others compared the situation in Singapore with other countries.
One commenter with the moniker 'Persimon' highlighted how paranoid the Minister seemed: “Why [do] so many people intend harm Sg?” He went on to compare US, UK, Canada and Australia saying that despite having free speech and free media for at least a decade, there countries were not ‘harmed’.
Another with moniker ‘millionare 394’ had even criticized the existence of Total Defence: “Total Defence [has] been more than 20 over years, yet i could not find a single mask when i needed to??”
‘Stephen Marlin’ was in agreement, “During HAZE, no N95 masks available even tho Govt had a HAZE meeting. During SARS, Govt didn't have a contingency plan until it starts to go out of our hands.”
Commenting on the Minister’s comments about disunity, another commenter by the name ‘Dante’ said “I thought the WORST form of disunity is when half of a country's population are FOREIGNERS, imported in the shortest time span of less than a decade?”
Shouldn't the Minister be more worried about 'real' threats like terrorism, corruption in the high levels of the civil service and rising crime rates rather than focusing on online comments?
It seems that more and more members of the PAP are out to smear the online voices of the citizens.