When the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act (POFMA) was first debated in Parliament in 2019, Minister for Home Affairs K Shanmugam repeatedly underlined one key point.
Every direction, he said, would put a named minister’s personal reputation on the line, creating a “very high onus” on whoever chose to use the law.
Former Workers’ Party Member of Parliament Leon Perera raised a concern about the “fake news” law that now feels particularly sharp.
He warned that ministers could use POFMA to stop “potentially embarrassing information”, creating a chilling effect on journalism and speech.
If uncomfortable facts never surface, he argued, voters cannot properly hold ministers to account, and even Parliament’s composition could be affected.
Perera also asked what recourse a victim would have if the falsehood came from the Government itself – from a ministry or agency – and whether POFMA actually widened state powers compared with the Telecommunications Act and Broadcasting Act.
In reply, Shanmugam insisted that embarrassment was irrelevant to the legal test.
What mattered, he said, was whether a statement was false and whether it was in the public interest to act.
He argued that any minister who misused POFMA to suppress true information would face “greater embarrassment” once taken to court.
He emphasised that ministers “put their personal reputations at stake every single time a decision is made” and described this as “a very high onus” hanging over them.
That was the promise in 2019: POFMA would target falsehoods, not embarrassment, and every direction would carry a real political and reputational cost for the minister who signed it.
Since then, he has become the most prolific individual issuer of POFMA directions.
On a straightforward count, he has personally signed 20 directions, more than any other member of the Cabinet.
The picture becomes sharper when we move from individuals to ministries.
Under Shanmugam’s watch, the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) has issued 23 correction-type directions.
The Ministry of Law (MinLaw), before Edwin Tong took over as Minister for Law, has issued 13.
Taken together, that makes 36 correction-type directions originating from the two portfolios he led over that period.
By comparison, the other ministries with the highest counts are:
– the Ministry of Health with 13 directions;
– the Ministry of National Development with 12.
So it is not that no other ministry is active under POFMA – Health and National Development clearly are, particularly in relation to COVID-19 and matters concerning HDB flats.
But even against those, Shanmugam’s ministries still form the single most POFMA-intensive cluster, with MHA alone sitting at the top of the individual ministry tally.
That raises an obvious question.
If POFMA was framed as a law for the good of all Singapore and its population, does its heavy use by the Home Affairs and Law portfolios suggest that, in practice, these ministries have benefited the most from its enforcement powers?
“Benefit” here does not have to mean bad faith.
It can simply mean which ministries have most frequently deployed POFMA to correct narratives, compel notices, and shape the public record.
By that measure, the clear institutional outlier is the cluster of ministries under Shanmugam’s watch.
MHA and MinLaw together outpace any other ministry, even though the Ministry of Health alone had a similar count to MinLaw before Tong issued his first POFMA direction as Minister for Law in early September.
Yet there is another part of the story that appears to depart from what Shanmugam told Parliament in 2019.
Despite this heavy use of POFMA from his ministries, the latest directions are increasingly not issued under Shanmugam’s name at all.
Data on POFMA directions shows a clear shift in who signs orders from the ministries under his charge.
Following the last POFMA direction on 5 November issued under Shanmugam’s name, every subsequent MHA direction in the table is signed either by Josephine Teo or Edwin Tong.
The same applies to MinLaw, where POFMA directions have been issued under Tong’s name, as Second Minister for Law, since July 2023.
The formal responsibility now appears, on paper, to be spread across Second Ministers and successors.
Take the MalaysiaNow case on the execution of drug courier Pannir Selvam on 8 October 2025 as an example.
The article in question alleged unfair treatment of Pannir and criticised Singapore’s death penalty regime. MHA responded that these claims were false and misleading, and instructed the POFMA Office to issue a Correction Direction.
The order went out under Tong’s name, even though it was issued on behalf of a ministry still led by Shanmugam. Tong, as Minister for Law and Second Minister for Home Affairs, was officially the one directing MalaysiaNow to correct its statements about the execution.
This is striking because, in the public eye, Shanmugam has long been the Government’s most prominent defender of the death penalty for drug offences.
He has forcefully argued in Parliament for retaining capital punishment for traffickers and has even fronted highly publicised challenges, including an offer of a live televised debate with Virgin Group founder Richard Branson over Singapore’s anti-drug and death penalty policies.
In other words, when it comes to capital punishment for drug trafficking, Shanmugam is the face most Singaporeans associate with the Government’s position. Tong has been involved in the legal and policy debates, but he has not been as publicly central to the broader narrative on the death penalty.
Against that backdrop, it is noteworthy that the POFMA direction defending the Government’s handling of Pannir’s execution bears Tong’s name rather than Shanmugam’s. If Shanmugam had signed this latest run of directions himself, his personal tally would be even more conspicuously ahead of every other minister’s.
This is where the accountability question returns, more sharply than before.
If POFMA was sold on the basis that a named minister accepts a “very high onus” each time a direction is issued, what does it mean when the most POFMA-active ministries increasingly rely on Second Ministers to sign the orders?
One interpretation is administrative: a natural division of labour, with Second Ministers handling operational decisions.
Another is optical: the law’s most visible champion and heaviest institutional user stepping back from having his name directly attached, even while his ministries still draw on POFMA the most.
The massage-chair analogy captures this neatly.
Someone persuades the community to buy a very expensive chair “for everyone’s benefit”, uses it more than anyone else, and later lets someone else’s name appear on the usage log – even though the chair remains in the same house.
However it is framed, the combination is striking: the ministries under Shanmugam – up to the handover in May 2025 – have been the heaviest users of POFMA, yet the names on many recent directions are no longer his.
That, more than any abstract debate, is where questions about the law’s real-world accountability now centre: not just how often POFMA is used, but who signs, who benefits institutionally, and whose reputation is actually on the line when a direction goes out.
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