Singapore Democrats
Mr Simon Milner, Facebook’s Vice President for Public Policy, Asia Pacific, has assured the SDP that the company has “well-established processes” in place to ensure that activities of its employees who may be engaged in partisan politics in Singapore “do not involve Facebook’s company resources”.
Mr Milner was replying to the SDP’s letter enquiring about the use of information on FB by the government and political parties in Singapore.
This follows the recent revelation that Cambridge Analytica (CA), a political consultancy firm, had unethically mined data from FB to influence election results in the United States and possibly other countries. FB says that about 65,000 users in Singapore may have had their information improperly shared by CA.
While FB is unable to provide information over CA’s relationships with any political entity in Singapore as, according to Mr Milner, “we do not have sight of such relationships”, the FB official assured us that FB is “committed to new levels of transparency around political and issue advertising in the future”.
The SDP told Mr Milner in our response to him that the party is concerned that the political system in Singapore is not more stacked against the opposition than it already is and that we look forward to FB continuing its non-partisan role in encouraging the sharing of news and information.
To read Mr Milner’s reply to the SDP in full, please click here.