Singapore keeps ban on 100 websites, rejects censorship committee’s recommendation

S’pore rejects recommendation, keeps website ban

SINGAPORE — Singapore said Wednesday it will continue a ban on 100 websites, rejecting a recommendation from a government-appointed panel to scrap Internet restrictions.

The government will block the websites — which contain pornographic content, incite racial and religious intolerance, or promote terrorism and extremism — as a symbolic gesture to reflect Singapore’s values, the Information Ministry said.

“We will retain it, not so much for its functional usefulness, rather as a symbolic statement of our society’s values,” acting Minister Lui Tuck Yew said. “It serves as a reminder that there is a significant body of material on the Internet that is unsavory and unedifying.”

However, the ministry said it will further relax censorship of theater plays, which it has eased in recent years in a bid to develop Singapore’s art scene and help make the island of 5.1 million people a more attractive place for foreign investment and workers.

“Invited arts groups will be given greater autonomy and they will no longer be required to have their scripts and materials pre-vetted,” Lui said.

Singapore enforces strict curbs on public speech, which the government says are necessary to maintain political stability in the multiethnic, multireligious city-state. Critics say the laws clamp down on dissent.

The government, which has been ruled by the People’s Action Party since independence in 1965, tends to micromanage the lives of Singaporeans. It bans the sale of chewing gum, exhorts citizens to speak proper English, and tries to stymie self-segregation by controlling the ethnic makeup of public apartment buildings.

“We need to move away from the prevailing reliance on government as guardian,” Goh Yew Lin, chairman of the Censorship Review Committee, said earlier this month.

The ministry said surveys show most Singaporeans support the website ban.

“We should move with, rather than move ahead of society,” Lui said. “While we want to increase content choices for adults, we have to first ensure that society is generally comfortable with the direction and pace of the changes.”

The committee, appointed by the ministry in September 2009, had urged the government to lift the ban and allow parents to use Internet filters to keep unwanted content from children.

The ministry said it also maintained a ban on screening R21 movies — films with sexual or violent content restricted to viewers at least 21 years old — near public housing estates, where about 80 percent of Singaporeans live.

The government will lift restrictions on buying R21 movies through video on demand at home, but keep an island-wide ban on DVD sales of the films.