More or Less: Freedom of Speech
In March 2020, Jolovan Wham stood outside a Singapore police station holding a smiley-face sign in support of two young climate activists who had been questioned by police days earlier for the same kind of solo protest. Eight months later he was charged under the Public Order Act, which requires a permit for public assemblies, even those involving a single individual. Supporters of the prosecution argued that consistent application of the law matters regardless of cause or scale; critics maintained that the charge was disproportionate to any plausible harm.
What stands out to me is not that Wham was charged. It is how muted the public reaction was, and what that absence tells you about how differently the relationship between speech, law and public life is understood here.
Singapore's Constitution guarantees freedom of speech. In practice, POFMA and the Public Order Act define its boundaries. POFMA allows the government to issue correction notices or remove content it deems false. Supporters argue it protects public discourse from disinformation in a socially complex society; critics question how much discretion the government should have in deciding what counts as false. Yet 28% of American college students, according to a 2023 survey by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, report self-censoring in classroom discussions fairly or very often. Stronger formal protection for speech does not appear to settle the question of what people feel able to say.
The social environment in which speech occurs matters as much as the legal one. In the US, public backlash and online shaming have created their own unwritten rules around speech. Those can be harder to navigate than an actual law because there is no clear line to know when you have crossed it.
Neither country has resolved this. The comparison shows the disconnect between what the law says and how speech actually works in practice. That disconnect is where the real difficulty sits. In the US, growing up where speech rights carry significant formal weight tends to make people more alert to anything that feels like a restriction. Singaporeans have largely internalised a different calculus: that free expression sits alongside other obligations, including keeping the peace in a multiracial society. Both countries have located the tension differently.
