TR EMERITUS

From our Correspondent

The Media Development Authority (MDA) of Singapore may implement rules requiring bloggers to declare if they receive gifts or money for their write-ups. (read full article here)

MDA deputy director for development policy, Ms Yuvarani Thangavelu, says such regulations will “protect consumers” by enabling them to make an informed assessment about what they read.

She did not give a timeframe for when such rules would kick in; neither did she reveal the likely penalties for flouting them, nor how they would be enforced.

Given the borderless and anonymous nature of cyberspace, it will be almost impossible for MDA to enforce the rule unless bloggers disclose the information voluntarily.

The real agenda behind the move, however, is probably to deter potential donors from funding and supporting bloggers, especially socio-political blogs with a high readership like ours.

At the present moment, only our site, The Online Citizen and the website of the Singapore Democratic Party accept donations from readers.

We cannot speak for others, but for the Temasek Review, we are not paid for writing articles to promote the product / services of a company or agenda of a political group.

The donations are simply made out of goodwill to support our general operations on a whole such as paying for the server and writers’ fees.

As of now, the rules are still very ambiguous and unclear, but we can never discount the possibility that MDA may extend it to all forms of extraneous income in the future.

If such a rule is indeed promulgated, donations for socio-political blogs will surely dry up because few Singaporeans will dare to have their identities revealed to MDA that they have been supporting sites which are critical of the government.

In the long run, this will have a detrimental impact on the growth and development of the new media in Singapore, especially for popular sites with a sizable readership but hampered by limited funding.

For this reason, we feel it is in our long-term interest to incorporate a company to run the site professionally to reduce our dependence on external donations though they do not amount to much in the first place.

With all our income and spending properly documented and declared to the tax authorities, there will be little room for MDA to find fault with us.

It is for this reason that we hope to eventually unite socio-political blogs with high readership under our umbrella to bypass the administrative hassles.

Without a company to provide some form of legitimacy, credibility and legal safety net for bloggers, it will be an uphill task for their sites to continue growing.

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