Where mainstream media is weak, the information environment risks capture – and can be turned against a society’s own national interests.
On June 6, 2026, the Ministry of Home Affairs directed YouTube, Facebook, and X to disable 14 posts targeting Singapore’s Indian community. The videos - originating from a platform based in China - claimed that Singapore was being “overrun” by Indians, that its multiracial policy was a facade, and that Singapore’s culture was fundamentally Chinese.
Law Minister and Second Minister for Home Affairs Edwin Tong, speaking to reporters the same day, said there was “currently no evidence to suggest that this is a coordinated campaign by any Government”. The content, he assessed, was “likely generated organically by various foreign netizens.”
Here is how the two-part operation worked:
- Li Shuyong Storytelling Theatre, a Douyin account with five million domestic followers, posted a video claiming “Indians are taking over Singapore” that amassed 66,000 likes before migrating to a YouTube mirror channel with just 199 subscribers.
- Several Facebook pages, pushing similar narratives, traced back to a single China-based digital marketing firm, Wubianjie, which Reporters Without Borders had flagged in April 2026 for operating hundreds of pages weaving Beijing-aligned narratives into apparent lifestyle content.
To be clear, foreign influence operations are a standing feature of great-power competition, practiced with varying sophistication by multiple actors across history. The concern here is therefore not about attribution but architecture - the structural conditions that make certain kinds of influence operations possible, and the civic institutions that open societies need to resist them.
With that said, the “organic” framing in Singapore’s context - commercial, uncoordinated, no state fingerprints - warrants closer examination. State-branded content is increasingly identifiable and discounted. Which raises a more pointed question: Has any state actor learned that influence lands most effectively when no one can see you holding the megaphone?
The best advertising isn’t paid
Nielsen’s global trust data reports that 92 percent of consumers trust earned media - peer recommendations, third-party reviews, independent commentary - above all other forms of advertising, a figure that has risen 18 percent since 2007.
In Asia-Pacific, it reaches 94 percent, and expert third-party content is 80 percent more effective at the point of decision than paid branded content. In other words, the further a message appears from its originating source, the more it is believed. This is the commercial logic underpinning the creator economy - over 200 million content creators generating a market Goldman Sachs estimated at US$250 billion in 2023, on track to approach US$480 billion by 2027.
It is also the organising logic of modern external propaganda. In Singapore’s case, the episode above suggests that foreign influence was working along three prongs.
First, from megaphone to ecosystem
The US State Department has formally designated state-linked media outlets such as Xinhua, CGTN and Global Times as foreign missions because they operate as instruments of party policy, not independent journalism. That model delivers reach, but as the BBC and others have documented, it is increasingly predictable and easily recognized for what it is.
Against that backdrop, President Xi Jinping’s call to “tell China’s story well” - first issued in 2013 and repeatedly amplified since — took on a different meaning. As the New York Times reported in 2024, Beijing has moved deliberately to cultivate foreign travel bloggers and lifestyle creators whose videos are promoted across state media precisely because they carry the message without the messenger’s fingerprints.
Second, the utility of frontier influencers
ASPI’s 2025 report identifies a growing cluster of YouTube accounts run by young, predominantly female, ethnic-minority creators from Xinjiang, Tibet, and Inner Mongolia – precisely the regions where Beijing faces its most damaging international criticism.
The content typically features cooking, fashion, tourism, daily life; tonally warm, personal, and algorithmically designed to travel. The message: “Western media lies, everything here is fine.”
ASPI identifies it as “professional user-generated content,” produced with support from Multi-Channel Networks (MCNs), some of which have publicly committed to promoting state-directed narratives, and in at least one documented case directly commissioned by party-state entities.
And because YouTube is blocked in China, the MCNs earn through YouTube’s own Partner Program - turning an American platform’s advertising infrastructure into a subsidy for Beijing-aligned influence operations.
Third, bait, switch, and migrate
The European Council on Foreign Relations has codified this approach as “bait and switch” - one of five techniques in the foreign information manipulation playbook, alongside “borrowing mouth,” “laundering,” “cloaking,” and “amplification.”
Case in point: The Wubianjie-linked pages I earlier referenced did not launch with anti-Indian content. They built credibility first – celebrity gossip, food reviews, local news – before pivoting to divisive narratives once the audience was established. Taiwan’s National Security Bureau had already identified this sequence in 2025.
What ASPI documents as organized, state-directed operations and what Wubianjie represents as commercially driven content are, in fact, different points on the same spectrum – but both ends serve the same strategic function. The commercial self-media ecosystem – 1 billion accounts, nearly 200 billion yuan in short-video revenue - provides the supply chain, populated by creators who have learned through trial and error that content disparaging foreigners is commercially safe while questioning the authorities domestically is not. That censorship asymmetry performs the structural conditioning without a state directive ever needing to be issued.
Mainstream media: A shield for Singapore and Southeast Asia
This is also the context in which Singapore’s mainstream media serves as a shield against foreign influence and interference – even performing a role that foreign policy circles would recognize as a form of “track‑three diplomacy.”
For instance, UNC3886 – assessed by Mandiant as a China-linked advanced persistent threat group targeting critical infrastructure - was named by Singapore’s Coordinating Minister for National Security K. Shanmugam in July 2025. The minister was careful to add that “naming a specific country is not in our interest at this point of time.”
Revelation of the China-nexus was instead carried and contextualized by Singapore’s mainstream press – The Straits Times, CNA and Lianhe Zaobao. ST deputy opinion editor Bhavan Jaipragas even gave the issue its fullest public treatment in two commentaries, both of which drew formal rebuttal letters from the Chinese Embassy, published in the same broadsheet.
The pattern across both episodes – information operations and cyber pre-positioning - illustrates that geopolitics is now managed across multiple domains at once: Technical and cognitive, network and narrative, executed in parallel.
Singapore’s framework enables the state to maintain its formal diplomatic posture; the mainstream press carries the full picture; the embassy responds in the same pages; the argument, the evidence, and the pushback all unfold in Singapore’s own public sphere.
That, in my view, is Singapore’s architecture working as intended: Legislation like the Online Criminal Harms Act, Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act, and Foreign Interference (Countermeasures) Act for enforcement; cyber defences for technical pre-positioning; and a trusted press for the public inoculation.
The model matters beyond Singapore. Freedom House has documented high-intensity foreign media influence efforts across Southeast Asia:
- In Malaysia, Chinese ambassadors have written regular op-eds in major Malay, Chinese and English-language outlets, shaping South China Sea narratives through a consistent package of rapport-building and counternarratives.
- In Indonesia, VOA documented content-sharing agreements with Metro TV, The Jakarta Post and Antara – outlets that researchers found systematically avoid negative coverage of China – while the China Media Project noted that influence operates through “economic incentives, professional exchanges, and editorial partnerships that gradually normalize Beijing’s perspectives.”
- In the Philippines, Reuters reported in 2025 that local marketing firm InfinitUs - acknowledged as the foreign embassy’s public relations contractor – ran fake social media accounts, built “Ni Hao Manila” to look Filipino-run, and amplified anti-American narratives. A Senate inquiry produced a 930,000-peso cheque as evidence.
Taken together, these cases demonstrate that influence operations gain the most traction where mainstream media is weakest, financially vulnerable, or politically compromised.
Conclusion: Treat mainstream media as a civic institution
Digital platforms with hundreds of millions of users; recommendation systems serving billions of clips a day; and content farms that can flood any narrative space faster than smaller states can fact-check it – this is the information environment in which Singapore and Southeast Asia now operate. In such a landscape, trying to outdo these foreign influence operations by sheer volume of content is neither realistic nor wise.
That is why, in a commentary last year, I argued Singapore should “treat our mainstream media as a civic institution, not a popularity contest.” The case is stronger now.
Where there is no trusted institutional mainstream media to contextualize and push back against foreign-originated narratives, any society’s information environment remains far easier to capture, manipulate, and be turned against its own national interests.
Read also my earlier essay, “Treat Mainstream Media as a Civic Institution, Not a Popularity Contest” (April 1, 2025).
Marcus Loh is the Chairman of the Public Affairs Group at the Public Relations and Communications Association (PRCA) Asia Pacific and a Director at Temus, a Singapore AI and digital services firm. Formerly the President of the Institute of Public Relations of Singapore, he helped strengthen the role of strategic communication and public affairs amid shifting policy, technological, and geoeconomic landscapes. He is currently an MA candidate at the War Studies Department of King’s College London.
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