Google Halts Political Ads In Singapore As Election Looms

Google has stopped accepting political ads in Singapore months before a widely expected election. Reuters reports: In email correspondence between the Singapore Democratic Party and a senior Google public policy official, the tech firm said it "will not accept advertising regulated by the Code of Practice for Transparency of Online Political Advertisements." The new code of practice, part of a controversial 'fake news' law introduced in October, requires advertising intermediaries to maintain detailed records of political adverts and their sponsors and make those records available to authorities. The code applies to "all advertisement or paid content that can reasonably be regarded as being directed towards a political end." SDP said the "shocking policy" would deprive voters of information ahead of that ballot. "In an election with the media totally dominated by the state, alternative parties would have no ability to educate and inform the voters of Singapore in the run up to the elections if we are not able to use Google's advertising platforms in the first place," Paul Tambyah, chairman of SDP, said in the correspondence.

No advertising money

[SmaryJerry]

So basically in Singapore you have to already have a following to spread a message now. Media, and in particular this case, the state run media basically decides what is truth or not, rather than allowing others to spread their message. Every action I see from Google and even YouTube lately seems to be authoritarian or enabling authoritarians.

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[jrumney]

Singapore has always been a one party dominated pseudo-democracy. Google is choosing not to play ball with the government's latest legislation designed to benefit the government. If they did accept the opposition's ads, the government would just declare it fake news and compel Google to release all the info which they would use to legally harass the opposition. That is the way politics has always worked in Singapore, and Google is right not to enable it.

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[Dr. Tom]

I wonder if Google will choose to do this in the US. Or did they already pull a political ad during the democratic debates?

-- with great power comes great responsibility

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[Dr. Tom]

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/t... [nbcnews.com]

oh yeah, they did

Re: No advertising money

[astrofurter]

Is anyone at all surprised that Big Brother Google is supporting one party dictatorship?

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[AmiMoJo]

What the fuck? Google is telling them that their system is broken and it will not participate. The only legal way to do that is to not allow any advertising.

They are resisting this authoritarianism.

It's like a Pavlovian reaction to the word "google" sometimes.

When democracy is dependent upon Goggle's ...

[CaptainDork]

... advertising platform, you gotta know shit's fucked up.

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[Carewolf]

Singapore is not a democracy

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[tlhIngan]

Singapore is not a democracy

Singapore calls itself a democracy, but it's more an authoritarian government, which is about a step down from a dictatorship. It actually ranks very low on the freedom index despite it being practically a first world nation.

So they do have elections, but they're mostly a sham since the opposition exists but are kept under control to prevent them from actually winning, accidentally or otherwise. About the only respectable thing is that true corruption is very rare for whatever re

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[ElectronicSpider]

We need to drop that cold war nomenclature, Switzerland was a third world country, for example.