Document Code: SG-H-THINK-40 Full Title: Edson C. Tandoc Jr — The Misinformation Scientist: Singapore's Leading Scholar of Fake News, Digital Journalism, and Information Integrity: An Intellectual Profile Coverage Period: c. 2014–present Level Designation: Intellectual Profile Primary Sources Consulted:

Edson C. Tandoc Jr, Zheng Wei Lim, and Richard Ling, "Defining 'Fake News': A Typology of Scholarly Definitions," Digital Journalism, Vol. 6, No. 2 (2018), pp. 137–153
Edson C. Tandoc Jr, "The Facts of Fake News: A Research Review," Sociology Compass, Vol. 13, No. 9 (2019), e12724
Edson C. Tandoc Jr, Ryan J. Thomas, and Lauren Bishop, "What Is (Fake) News? Analyzing News Values (and More) in Fake Stories," Media and Communication, Vol. 9, No. 1 (2021), pp. 110–119
Edson C. Tandoc Jr, "Tools of Disinformation: How Fake News Gets to Deceive," in Howard Tumber and Silvio Waisbord (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Media Disinformation and Populism (London: Routledge, 2021)
Edson C. Tandoc Jr, Richard Ling, Oscar Westlund, Andrew Duffy, Debbie Goh, and Lim Zheng Wei, "Audiences' Acts of Authentication in the Age of Fake News: A Conceptual Framework," New Media & Society, Vol. 20, No. 8 (2018), pp. 2745–2763
Edson C. Tandoc Jr, Cassie Lee, and Dyjuan Tay, "Correcting the Record on Social Media: The Role of Perceived Issue Relevance in Responding to Fake News," Journal of Communication, Vol. 72, No. 5 (2022), pp. 564–588
Edson C. Tandoc Jr, Marites D. Vitolo, and Joy C. Delos Santos, "COVID-19 Misinformation in Singapore: Examining the Role of WhatsApp as a Conduit for False Information," Asian Journal of Communication, Vol. 32, No. 1 (2022), pp. 1–18
Edson C. Tandoc Jr, "Fake News Laws in Southeast Asia: How Indonesia and Singapore Are Reshaping the Information Environment," in Information, Technology and Control in a Changing World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023)
Edson C. Tandoc Jr and Sho Morita, "Diffusion of Disinformation: How Social Media Users Respond to Fake News on Facebook," Journalism, Vol. 23, No. 2 (2020), pp. 382–398
Edson C. Tandoc Jr, Mingyi Hou, and Yan Xian Florence Lim, "News Coverage of COVID-19 Misinformation: How Singapore's Mainstream Media Framed the Infodemic," Journalism Practice, Vol. 17, No. 5 (2023), pp. 919–937
Edson C. Tandoc Jr, Jing Zeng, and Tim Dawson, Tools for the Disinformation Age: Digital Literacy and New Inoculation Strategies (Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024)
"Select Committee on Deliberate Online Falsehoods: Report," Parliament of Singapore, September 2018
Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act 2019, Republic of Singapore (Act 18 of 2019)
Singapore Parliamentary Debates on POFMA, Hansard, May 2019
Cherian George, Freedom from the Press: Journalism and State Power in Singapore (Singapore: NUS Press, 2012)
Smart Nation and Digital Government Office, Smart Nation: The Way Forward (Singapore, 2018)
Carol Soon and Shawn Goh, "Navigating the Infodemic: How Singaporeans Discern, Verify, and Resist Online Falsehoods," IPS Working Papers, No. 41 (2021)

Related Documents:

SG-D-27 | POFMA — Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act
SG-O-07 | Digital Governance and the Smart Nation Initiative
SG-M-06 | Technocratic Governance
SG-H-THINK-15 | Cherian George — Media, Censorship, and Calibrated Coercion
SG-H-THINK-18 | Bertha Henson — Journalism and Public Accountability
SG-B-08 | COVID-19 and the Pandemic Government
SG-I-11 | The Civil Service as Institution

Version Date: 2026-04-02

Key Takeaways

Tandoc is the foremost empirical scholar of misinformation in Singapore. As President's Chair Professor of Communication Studies at Nanyang Technological University, he has built a research programme that combines large-scale surveys, content analysis, and experimental methods to understand how fake news is produced, circulated, believed, and corrected in the Singapore context. His work provides the most rigorous evidence base available for understanding how Singaporeans actually interact with false information online — a question that has enormous implications for the legitimacy and calibration of the government's regulatory response through POFMA.
His typological work on "fake news" brought conceptual clarity to a dangerously vague term. Tandoc's 2018 paper in Digital Journalism, which systematically reviewed and classified scholarly definitions of fake news, became one of the most widely cited papers in the field globally. By distinguishing between satire, news parody, fabrication, manipulation, advertising, and propaganda, Tandoc demonstrated that the catch-all term "fake news" obscured fundamentally different phenomena requiring different responses — a distinction that Singapore's legislative framework has not always honoured.
His research reveals that most Singaporeans are passive in the face of misinformation. Tandoc's national survey of 2,501 respondents and subsequent experimental studies found that the majority of social media users in Singapore simply scroll past fake news posts without engaging. Users only offer corrections when the issue is strongly personally relevant to them — a finding that challenges both the government's narrative of urgent public vulnerability and the assumption that citizen fact-checking can substitute for institutional responses.
His COVID-19 misinformation research provided critical real-time evidence during the pandemic. Tandoc and his team analysed over 2,000 mainstream media articles on COVID-19 misinformation and collected 153 forwarded WhatsApp messages during the early months of the pandemic, finding that approximately 35 per cent contained false or misleading claims. This research documented the specific pathways through which health misinformation circulated in Singapore's distinctive media ecosystem, where WhatsApp family groups function as a parallel information infrastructure.
He brings a comparative Southeast Asian perspective that enriches Singapore-specific analysis. As a Filipino-Singaporean scholar, Tandoc has systematically compared fake news legislation and its effects across Southeast Asian countries, particularly Singapore and Indonesia. This comparative framework allows him to situate POFMA within a regional trend of governments using anti-misinformation legislation for purposes that extend beyond their stated objectives — without reducing Singapore's approach to a simple authoritarian model.
His institution-building at NTU's IN-cube centre represents a new model for applied media research. As founding director of the Centre for Information Integrity and the Internet, Tandoc has created an institutional platform that bridges academic research and policy application. The centre's focus on information integrity — rather than simple fact-checking — reflects a sophisticated understanding that the challenge of misinformation cannot be solved by debunking alone but requires attention to the structural conditions that make societies vulnerable to false information.
Tandoc occupies a distinctive position in Singapore's media scholarship landscape. Unlike Cherian George (SG-H-THINK-15), whose work centres on state-media power relations and whose critical stance has placed him in direct confrontation with the establishment, Tandoc operates primarily as an empiricist whose data-driven findings can be cited by both proponents and critics of government regulation. This positioning — more scientist than activist — has allowed him to build institutional support within Singapore while producing research that has quietly complicated the government's claims about the threat posed by misinformation and the efficacy of legislative responses.
His work on digital literacy and inoculation strategies points toward a post-POFMA future. Tandoc's more recent research has moved beyond documenting the problem of misinformation toward developing and testing interventions — particularly digital literacy programmes and psychological inoculation techniques — that could reduce vulnerability to false information without relying on state enforcement. This line of work represents a potentially important alternative or complement to Singapore's regulatory approach.

Part I: The Scholar and His Formation

1.1 Origins and Intellectual Background

Edson C. Tandoc Jr is a Filipino-born communication scholar who has become one of the world's leading researchers on misinformation, fake news, and the sociology of digital journalism. His intellectual formation spans the Philippines, the United States, and Singapore — a trajectory that has given him an unusual combination of Global South perspective, rigorous American social-science training, and deep immersion in the specific media environment of a small, highly connected, tightly regulated Asian city-state.

Tandoc received his PhD in Journalism from the University of Missouri, one of the oldest and most respected journalism programmes in the United States. The Missouri programme is distinguished by its emphasis on empirical research methods — survey design, content analysis, experimental protocols — and by its commitment to studying journalism not merely as a normative ideal but as a set of observable social practices. This methodological orientation proved decisive for Tandoc's subsequent career. Where many scholars of misinformation have approached the subject through the lenses of political theory, ethics, or cultural studies, Tandoc's work is fundamentally empirical: it asks not what fake news means in the abstract but how specific populations encounter, process, believe, share, and respond to specific instances of false information under specific conditions.

Before his doctoral work, Tandoc had trained and worked as a journalist in the Philippines, a media environment characterised by high press freedom, intense political competition, a cacophonous social media landscape, and endemic problems with disinformation — particularly during elections. The Philippine experience gave Tandoc a visceral understanding of the damage that misinformation could inflict on public discourse. It also gave him an understanding that misinformation was not simply a technology problem but a social and political one, rooted in the structure of media systems, the incentives of political actors, and the information-processing habits of ordinary citizens.

Tandoc's early academic publications, emerging from his doctoral work at Missouri, focused on the sociology of news production — how journalists make decisions about what to cover, how to frame stories, and how to adapt their practices to the digital environment. Papers on the gatekeeping function in online journalism, the use of analytics in newsrooms, and the relationship between journalists and their audiences established Tandoc as a scholar interested in the entire chain of message construction and reception, not merely in the endpoint of audience effects. This holistic perspective would prove essential when he turned his attention to misinformation, because it allowed him to study fake news not as an isolated pathology but as a distortion of the broader information ecosystem.

1.2 Arrival in Singapore and the NTU Platform

Tandoc joined Nanyang Technological University's Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information as an assistant professor in the mid-2010s, during a period of rapid institutional investment in communication and media studies in Singapore. NTU's communication school, named after the former President of Singapore, had been building its research profile aggressively, recruiting internationally and investing in quantitative social-science infrastructure. For a scholar of Tandoc's methodological orientation — survey-based, experimental, computationally informed — the NTU environment offered substantial resources: access to Singapore's highly literate, highly connected population as a research site; institutional support for large-scale survey research; and proximity to a government that was increasingly preoccupied with questions of information integrity.

Singapore, by the mid-2010s, was an ideal laboratory for the study of misinformation. The city-state had one of the highest smartphone penetration rates in the world, with over 80 per cent of the population active on social media. WhatsApp had become a ubiquitous platform for family and community communication, creating closed networks through which information — and misinformation — could circulate with minimal public visibility or accountability. At the same time, Singapore's mainstream media remained tightly controlled through the government's regulatory framework and ownership structure, creating a distinctive dual information environment: a highly managed official media sphere alongside a largely unmanaged social media sphere. This duality made Singapore a uniquely valuable research site for studying how misinformation operates in the gap between official information channels and informal digital networks.

The timing of Tandoc's arrival also coincided with a global surge of concern about misinformation, driven by the 2016 United States presidential election, the Brexit referendum, and a series of viral hoaxes that demonstrated the capacity of social media platforms to amplify false information at unprecedented scale. In Singapore, the government was moving toward a legislative response to these concerns — a process that would culminate in the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act (POFMA) in 2019 (see SG-D-27). Tandoc's emerging expertise in the empirical study of fake news positioned him as a scholar whose work was directly relevant to the most consequential media-policy debate in Singapore's recent history.

Tandoc rose through the academic ranks with notable speed. He was promoted to Associate Professor and subsequently appointed President's Chair Professor of Communication Studies — one of NTU's most prestigious academic positions, carrying significant research funding and institutional recognition. He also became Associate Chair for Research at the Wee Kim Wee School, giving him administrative oversight of the school's research strategy. These appointments reflected both the quality of Tandoc's scholarly output and the strategic importance that NTU placed on misinformation research as a field where Singapore-based scholarship could achieve global prominence.

The contrast with the trajectory of Cherian George (SG-H-THINK-15), who was denied tenure at the same institution a decade earlier, is instructive. George's work on media and state power was critical of the Singapore government's approach to press regulation; Tandoc's work on misinformation, while producing findings that could be uncomfortable for the government, was framed in the neutral language of empirical social science rather than the normative language of political critique. The difference in institutional outcome — George was effectively pushed out of Singapore academia; Tandoc was promoted to the highest professorial rank — reveals something important about the conditions under which critical scholarship can flourish in Singapore. The city-state's universities are not hostile to research that produces inconvenient findings; they are hostile to research that is framed as political opposition. Tandoc's empiricism gave him a form of institutional protection that George's critical commentary did not.

Part II: Core Intellectual Contributions

2.1 Defining Fake News: A Typological Framework

Tandoc's single most influential contribution to the global literature on misinformation is his 2018 paper, co-authored with Zheng Wei Lim and Richard Ling, "Defining 'Fake News': A Typology of Scholarly Definitions," published in Digital Journalism. The paper conducted a systematic review of 34 academic articles that used the term "fake news" and found that the term was being applied to at least six distinct phenomena: news satire, news parody, news fabrication, photo manipulation, advertising and public relations, and propaganda. Each of these categories involved different actors, different intentions, different mechanisms of deception, and different levels of factual basis — yet all were being collapsed into the single, politically charged term "fake news."

The significance of this typological work was both scholarly and practical. At the scholarly level, it demonstrated that the field of misinformation research was hampered by conceptual confusion: researchers studying news satire (such as The Onion or Singapore's satirical website The Kopi Lim) were being grouped with researchers studying deliberate political fabrication (such as the Macedonian content farms that produced false stories during the 2016 US election), even though the two phenomena had virtually nothing in common beyond a loose association with falsehood. This conflation made it difficult to accumulate knowledge, compare findings across studies, or develop targeted interventions.

At the practical level, the typology had direct implications for regulation. If "fake news" was a single phenomenon, then a single legislative response — such as POFMA — might be appropriate. But if "fake news" encompassed fundamentally different categories of content, then a single regulatory instrument risked being either too broad (catching satire and opinion alongside deliberate fabrication) or too narrow (addressing only one type of falsehood while leaving others untouched). Tandoc's typology did not explicitly critique POFMA — the paper was published before the Act was passed — but it provided a conceptual framework that made the limitations of any catch-all approach visible.

The paper became one of the most cited works in the misinformation literature, accumulating thousands of citations and establishing Tandoc as a definitional authority in the field. It was followed by a 2019 review article in Sociology Compass, "The Facts of Fake News," which extended the typological work into a comprehensive research agenda, identifying gaps in the literature and proposing directions for future study. Together, these two papers established Tandoc's reputation as a scholar who could bring order to a chaotic and rapidly growing field.

Beyond definitional work, Tandoc's research programme has focused on the social and psychological processes through which misinformation gains traction. His approach is distinctive in its emphasis on the role of the audience — not as passive victims of deceptive content, but as active agents whose pre-existing beliefs, social contexts, and platform behaviours shape how they encounter, evaluate, and respond to false information.

A central finding across multiple studies is that the believability of fake news is not primarily a function of the quality of the deception but of the congruence between the false claim and the recipient's prior beliefs and social identity. People are more likely to believe false information that confirms what they already think, that aligns with the views of their social group, and that triggers strong emotional responses — particularly anger and anxiety. This finding, consistent with the broader literature on motivated reasoning, has specific implications for Singapore, where the government's framing of misinformation as a problem of external interference (foreign actors deliberately injecting falsehoods into Singapore's information space) may understate the degree to which domestic social dynamics — racial anxieties, economic insecurities, political grievances — create fertile ground for false claims.

Tandoc's work on the sharing of misinformation has also produced findings that complicate simple narratives. His research suggests that people share false information not primarily because they believe it to be true, but for a variety of social reasons: to express group solidarity, to signal political identity, to entertain, or simply because the frictionless architecture of social media platforms makes sharing easier than evaluating. The "share" button, in Tandoc's analysis, is not a truth-endorsement mechanism but a social gesture — and designing regulatory responses as if sharing were equivalent to believing fundamentally misunderstands the phenomenon.

This sociological perspective — which treats misinformation as a feature of social systems rather than a defect of individual cognition — represents a significant departure from the "information deficit" model that has dominated much government thinking about fake news, including in Singapore. The deficit model assumes that people believe false information because they lack the knowledge or skills to evaluate it, and that the solution is therefore to provide better information or better education. Tandoc's research suggests that the problem is more intractable: people may have the skills to evaluate information but choose not to deploy them, or may deploy them selectively in service of prior commitments.

2.3 Audiences' Acts of Authentication

One of Tandoc's most theoretically ambitious contributions is the concept of "audiences' acts of authentication," developed in a 2018 paper in New Media & Society co-authored with Richard Ling, Oscar Westlund, Andrew Duffy, Debbie Goh, and Lim Zheng Wei. The paper proposed a conceptual framework for understanding how audiences actively assess the credibility of news content in the digital environment — a process that Tandoc and his co-authors termed "authentication."

The framework identified multiple dimensions along which audiences evaluate news: the credibility of the source, the plausibility of the claim, the consistency of the information with other sources, and the social endorsement of the content (i.e., whether people the reader trusts have shared or endorsed it). Importantly, the framework recognised that authentication is not a purely cognitive process but a social one: people assess the credibility of information in part by observing how their social networks respond to it. If trusted contacts share a piece of content without challenge, this functions as an implicit endorsement that can override individual scepticism.

The authentication framework had particular relevance for Singapore's media environment. In a society where mainstream media is widely perceived as credible but also as government-aligned, and where social media offers alternative sources of information that are perceived as more independent but also less reliable, the question of how citizens navigate between these sources is central to the functioning of the information ecosystem. Tandoc's framework suggested that Singaporeans do not simply choose between mainstream media and social media but engage in a continuous, socially embedded process of cross-referencing, triangulating, and evaluating — a process that is more sophisticated than either the government's concern about citizen vulnerability or the opposition's narrative of citizen scepticism would suggest.

The authentication framework also raised important questions about the design of platform interventions. If audiences authenticate information through social processes — relying on the judgments of trusted contacts — then interventions that focus on labelling content (such as Facebook's "disputed" tags) may be less effective than interventions that leverage social networks (such as encouraging trusted contacts to flag problematic content). This insight has informed Tandoc's subsequent work on corrective behaviour on social media.

2.4 Correcting the Record: When Users Speak Up (and When They Don't)

Perhaps Tandoc's most policy-relevant finding for the Singapore context concerns the question of when ordinary citizens will correct misinformation they encounter on social media — and when they will not. His 2022 paper in the Journal of Communication, co-authored with Cassie Lee and Dyjuan Tay, examined this question through a combination of survey data and experimental methods, producing results that were both counter-intuitive and deeply consequential.

The central finding was that the vast majority of Singaporean social media users, when they encounter a post they believe to be false, do nothing. They do not share the post, but they also do not correct it, challenge it, or flag it. They simply scroll past. The study found that users were significantly more likely to attempt a correction only when the false claim was about an issue they perceived as personally relevant — a finding that held even after controlling for confidence in one's own knowledge and for general political engagement.

This finding has multiple implications. First, it suggests that the "marketplace of ideas" model — in which falsehoods are naturally corrected by the competition of truths — does not operate effectively on social media, at least not in the Singapore context. The assumption that citizen vigilance can serve as a check on misinformation is empirically unsupported; most citizens are free riders who benefit from corrections made by others but do not contribute corrections themselves. Second, the finding that personal relevance is the primary driver of corrective behaviour suggests that misinformation about general public issues (macroeconomic policy, foreign affairs, institutional governance) is less likely to be corrected than misinformation about issues that directly affect individuals (healthcare, education, housing). This creates a systematic bias in the self-correcting capacity of the information ecosystem.

Third, and most directly relevant to the POFMA debate, the finding provided empirical grounding for one of the government's key arguments in favour of legislative intervention: that the information environment cannot be left to self-regulate because citizens will not spontaneously correct falsehoods at sufficient scale. But the finding also complicated the government's position, because it raised the question of whether POFMA's correction directions — which require the posting of government-approved corrections alongside allegedly false statements — actually change audience behaviour, or whether they are scrolled past with the same indifference that greets most other content in a saturated information environment. Tandoc's subsequent research has explored this question, producing evidence that the effectiveness of corrections depends heavily on their format, timing, and the perceived credibility of the correcting authority — variables that POFMA's relatively rigid correction mechanism does not optimise for.

Part III: Singapore's Information Environment

3.1 The POFMA Context: Studying Fake News in a Regulated State

The Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act, passed by the Singapore Parliament in May 2019 after an extended public debate that included a Select Committee hearing in 2018, created the legislative context within which Tandoc's research has been both consumed and contested (see SG-D-27). POFMA empowers government ministers to issue correction directions, stop communication directions, and access blocking orders against content they determine to be false statements of fact that are contrary to the public interest. The Act was among the most comprehensive anti-misinformation laws passed by any democratic or semi-democratic government, and it attracted international scrutiny from press freedom organisations, technology companies, and academic researchers.

Tandoc's relationship to POFMA is more complex than that of most commentators. He was not among the activist-academics who publicly opposed the legislation — a role played more visibly by scholars such as Cherian George (SG-H-THINK-15) and by civil society organisations such as the Asia Centre and Reporters Without Borders. Nor was he a supporter of the legislation in the manner of government-aligned commentators who presented POFMA as a necessary and proportionate response to an existential threat. Instead, Tandoc functioned as a supplier of empirical evidence that could be — and was — cited by multiple sides of the debate.

His typological work on fake news definitions, for instance, implicitly challenged the legislative premise that "false statements of fact" could be clearly delineated from opinion, satire, and interpretation — a challenge that POFMA's critics took up with vigour. His research on audience passivity in the face of misinformation could be read as supporting the government's case that market mechanisms alone were insufficient to address the problem. His work on the social drivers of misinformation belief complicated the government's emphasis on foreign interference by highlighting the domestic roots of vulnerability to false information.

This ambiguity was not accidental. Tandoc's methodological commitment to empiricism — to reporting what the data showed, regardless of its political convenience — placed him in a space that neither side of the POFMA debate could fully claim. For scholars operating in Singapore's constrained academic environment, this positioning offers a model: by grounding claims in replicable data rather than normative arguments, it is possible to produce research that informs policy debates without triggering the institutional retribution that has attended more openly critical scholarship.

At the same time, the empiricist stance has its limitations. Tandoc's published work has not directly assessed whether POFMA's correction directions are effective at changing beliefs — a question that would require access to government data on the reach and impact of corrections that has not been made publicly available. Nor has he published a systematic evaluation of whether POFMA has been applied proportionately or whether it has produced chilling effects on legitimate speech — questions that would require the kind of political-institutional analysis that falls outside the boundaries of his methodological approach. The empiricist's discipline is also the empiricist's constraint.

3.2 Fake News Laws in Southeast Asia: Comparative Analysis

One of Tandoc's most distinctive contributions has been his comparative analysis of fake news legislation across Southeast Asia, particularly his studies of how anti-misinformation laws in Singapore and Indonesia have affected journalistic practice and public discourse. This comparative work, which draws on interviews with journalists, editors, and sources in both countries, provides crucial context for evaluating POFMA by situating it within a regional pattern rather than treating it as a sui generis Singaporean innovation.

Tandoc's comparative research has documented several findings of significance. First, fake news laws in both Singapore and Indonesia have produced measurable chilling effects on journalistic sources — individuals who would otherwise provide information to reporters have become more reluctant to do so when they perceive a risk that their statements could be characterised as false under the law. This chilling effect operates not through direct enforcement but through anticipatory self-censorship: sources do not need to be prosecuted under fake news laws to be deterred by them; the mere existence of the legal framework, combined with uncertainty about how it will be applied, is sufficient to constrain information flows.

Second, the research has found that journalists in both countries have adapted their practices in response to fake news legislation — but not always in ways that improve information quality. Some journalists have become more rigorous in fact-checking, which is the intended effect of the legislation. But others have simply avoided reporting on sensitive topics where the risk of being accused of falsehood is highest, which reduces the total amount of public-interest journalism without improving its accuracy. Still others have shifted toward "safe" topics — lifestyle, entertainment, sports — where the regulatory risk is negligible. The net effect, Tandoc's research suggests, is a narrowing of the information environment rather than an improvement in its accuracy.

Third, Tandoc's comparative analysis has highlighted important differences between Singapore's and Indonesia's approaches that reflect their different political systems. Singapore's POFMA is a ministerial tool — individual ministers determine what constitutes a false statement and issue correction directions without prior judicial review. Indonesia's approach, while also problematic, operates through different institutional channels and is applied in a more diffuse and less centralised manner. The comparison allows Tandoc to demonstrate that the effects of fake news legislation are not determined solely by the text of the law but by the institutional context in which it is applied — a finding with clear implications for Singapore, where the concentration of executive power means that POFMA is wielded by precisely the actors who have the strongest interest in controlling the information environment.

This comparative work places Tandoc in a scholarly tradition that is well established in Singapore studies: the use of regional comparison to illuminate what is distinctive about the Singaporean case. Just as scholars of Singapore's economic model have used comparisons with Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea to identify the specific features of Singapore's developmental state, Tandoc uses comparisons with Indonesia and other Southeast Asian countries to identify what is specific about Singapore's approach to information regulation. The result is a body of work that is simultaneously about Singapore and about the broader phenomenon of state responses to digital misinformation — a dual relevance that has made Tandoc's research valuable to both domestic policy audiences and international scholarly networks.

3.3 The National Survey: How Singaporeans Encounter Misinformation

Among Tandoc's most empirically ambitious projects has been a series of national surveys examining how Singaporeans encounter, evaluate, and respond to misinformation. The largest of these surveys, conducted with a nationally representative sample of 2,501 respondents, provided the most comprehensive picture available of the misinformation landscape as experienced by ordinary Singaporean citizens — a perspective that had been largely absent from a policy debate dominated by elite anxieties and anecdotal examples.

The survey findings challenged several widely held assumptions. First, the survey found that while a significant proportion of Singaporeans reported encountering fake news on social media, the frequency and intensity of exposure was lower than the public discourse might suggest. The average Singaporean was not drowning in a sea of misinformation; they encountered false claims occasionally, typically on platforms such as Facebook and WhatsApp, and typically about health, politics, or local events. The gap between the level of exposure reported by citizens and the level of threat described by government officials suggested that the political salience of the misinformation problem may have exceeded its empirical magnitude.

Second, the survey revealed significant demographic variation in misinformation exposure and response. Older Singaporeans, particularly those in the 55-and-above age bracket, were more likely to report encountering misinformation on WhatsApp — consistent with the platform's role as a primary communication tool for older generations. Younger Singaporeans were more likely to encounter misinformation on Instagram and TikTok but were also more confident in their ability to identify false content. Educational attainment was positively correlated with fact-checking behaviour but, counterintuitively, not strongly correlated with actual accuracy in identifying false claims — a finding that undermined the assumption that education alone could solve the misinformation problem.

Third, and most consequentially for policy, the survey found that trust in mainstream media remained relatively high among Singaporeans, but that this trust was layered and conditional. Respondents trusted mainstream media for factual reporting on official matters (government announcements, economic data, public health information) but were more sceptical of mainstream media's coverage of political controversy and social issues. This conditional trust created a specific vulnerability: when false claims circulated about topics on which mainstream media was perceived as less credible, the self-correcting mechanisms of the information ecosystem were weakest.

The survey data also revealed something about the social structure of misinformation in Singapore. False claims circulated most effectively within closed social networks — family WhatsApp groups, alumni chat groups, religious community channels — where social bonds created pressure against public correction. Challenging a false claim posted by a family elder or a community leader carried social costs that most Singaporeans were unwilling to pay. This finding pointed to a structural feature of Singapore's communitarian social organisation that made it simultaneously more resilient (strong social bonds provide access to trusted information) and more vulnerable (the same bonds inhibit correction of false information within the group) to misinformation.

Part IV: The COVID-19 Infodemic

4.1 WhatsApp as a Conduit for Falsehood

The COVID-19 pandemic, which struck Singapore in January 2020 and triggered the most extensive government intervention in public life since independence (see SG-B-08), provided a dramatic real-world test of the misinformation dynamics that Tandoc had been studying in controlled settings. The pandemic combined all the conditions most conducive to misinformation: high uncertainty, intense public anxiety, rapidly evolving scientific knowledge, strong emotional stakes, and a population confined to their homes with unprecedented levels of screen time. Tandoc and his research team mobilised rapidly to study how misinformation about COVID-19 circulated in Singapore — producing some of the earliest and most granular empirical evidence on the pandemic infodemic in any national context.

The most striking study focused on WhatsApp, which had emerged as a central node in Singapore's informal information infrastructure. WhatsApp's architecture — end-to-end encrypted, group-based, closed to external monitoring — made it an ideal channel for the rapid circulation of unverified claims. Unlike Facebook or Twitter, where content was at least theoretically visible to fact-checkers and platform moderators, WhatsApp messages circulated in a regulatory blind spot. POFMA, designed primarily for publicly accessible online content, had limited applicability to private messaging platforms.

Tandoc's team collected 153 forwarded WhatsApp messages related to COVID-19 during the early months of the pandemic — a period that encompassed Singapore's initial containment success, its subsequent "circuit breaker" lockdown in April 2020, and the alarming outbreak in migrant worker dormitories that exposed the fragility of the city-state's containment strategy. The collection methodology relied on volunteer participants who forwarded messages they received in their WhatsApp groups, providing researchers with a window into the actual content circulating in private channels.

The findings were sobering. Approximately 35 per cent of the collected messages contained false or misleading information. The false claims ranged widely: some asserted that the virus had been engineered in a Chinese laboratory (a claim that was unverified at the time and remains contested); others promoted unproven remedies, from drinking warm water to consuming garlic or traditional Chinese medicine; still others made false claims about government policy, including fabricated lockdown orders and fictitious infection statistics. Many messages carried a veneer of authority — they were attributed to "a doctor friend," "a nurse at SGH," or "someone in the government" — that made them more credible to recipients than anonymous social media posts.

The WhatsApp study also documented the emotional architecture of pandemic misinformation. False messages were disproportionately framed in terms of urgency and care: they were forwarded by family members and friends who believed they were helping their loved ones by passing along potentially life-saving information. The social dynamics of forwarding — driven by concern rather than malice — meant that the senders of misinformation were often the most trusted members of recipients' social networks. This finding underscored the inadequacy of models that treated misinformation as a product of bad actors; in the WhatsApp ecosystem, the propagators of false information were frequently well-intentioned people acting out of concern for those they cared about.

4.2 Mainstream Media and the Framing of the Infodemic

Complementing the WhatsApp study, Tandoc and his team conducted a large-scale content analysis of how Singapore's mainstream media covered the phenomenon of COVID-19 misinformation itself. The study analysed approximately 2,000 news articles from Singapore's major English-language outlets — primarily The Straits Times, TODAY, and Channel NewsAsia — that addressed misinformation, fake news, or information integrity in the context of the pandemic.

The findings revealed a distinctive pattern in how mainstream media framed the infodemic. The dominant frame was what Tandoc termed the "threat frame": mainstream media overwhelmingly presented misinformation as a dangerous external force threatening Singapore's pandemic response, social cohesion, and public health. This framing aligned with the government's narrative and with the institutional interests of mainstream media itself, which positioned traditional journalism as the antidote to the misinformation virus. The threat frame was not inaccurate — misinformation about COVID-19 genuinely posed risks to public health — but it was selective. It emphasised the most dramatic and dangerous instances of false information while underplaying the mundane reality that most misinformation exposure was low-intensity, transient, and had limited behavioural impact.

The study also found that mainstream media coverage of misinformation disproportionately focused on certain types of false claims — particularly health-related claims (false remedies, fabricated infection statistics) and politically charged claims (accusations of government incompetence, conspiracy theories about the virus's origins) — while giving less attention to the structural conditions that made misinformation possible. The underlying dynamics of platform architecture, algorithmic amplification, digital literacy gaps, and the erosion of institutional trust received comparatively little coverage. In other words, mainstream media covered the symptoms of the infodemic more effectively than its causes.

A further finding concerned the role of POFMA in shaping media coverage. The study documented that mainstream media frequently reported on the government's use of POFMA correction directions during the pandemic, framing these as decisive and effective interventions against falsehood. But the coverage rarely subjected POFMA's effectiveness to critical evaluation: whether the corrections actually reached the audiences that had been exposed to the original false claims, whether they changed beliefs, or whether the correction mechanism was well-designed for the rapid-fire information environment of a pandemic were questions that mainstream media largely left unexamined. This finding highlighted the limits of mainstream media as a check on misinformation: in Singapore's media ecosystem, mainstream outlets were more likely to amplify the government's framing of the misinformation problem than to interrogate it.

4.3 Lessons for Pandemic Information Management

The COVID-19 misinformation research produced a series of findings with direct implications for how Singapore — and other highly connected societies — might manage information during future crises. Tandoc synthesised these lessons in several publications and public presentations, articulating a framework that went beyond the "more facts, more enforcement" approach that characterised much government thinking.

First, the research demonstrated that speed mattered more than comprehensiveness in crisis communication. During the pandemic, false claims on WhatsApp could reach tens of thousands of Singaporeans within hours, while official corrections — which required verification, approval, and publication through formal channels — often arrived days later. By the time a correction appeared, the false claim had already been absorbed, discussed, and in many cases forgotten, replaced by the next wave of alarming information. Tandoc's research suggested that governments needed to invest in rapid-response communication infrastructure that could match the speed of informal information networks — a lesson that Singapore's Government Technology Agency and the Ministry of Communications and Information incorporated into their pandemic communication strategies.

Second, the research underscored the importance of trusted messengers. The WhatsApp study showed that false information was credible because it came from trusted sources — family members, friends, community leaders. Corrections issued by government agencies, no matter how factually accurate, lacked the social credibility of messages from personal contacts. This finding implied that effective counter-misinformation strategies needed to recruit trusted community voices — general practitioners, religious leaders, teachers, neighbourhood figures — as channels for accurate information, rather than relying solely on top-down government communication.

Third, Tandoc's work on the mainstream media's framing of the infodemic pointed to the risks of a purely defensive communication strategy. When the government's response to misinformation was primarily punitive (issuing POFMA directions, threatening prosecution) rather than educative, it risked reinforcing public anxiety about the information environment without actually improving citizens' capacity to navigate it. Tandoc's research suggested that pandemic communication should combine enforcement with sustained investment in digital literacy — helping citizens develop the skills and habits to evaluate information independently, rather than depending on government intervention for every false claim.

These lessons intersected with the broader trajectory of Singapore's digital governance strategy (see SG-O-07). The pandemic revealed both the strengths and the weaknesses of Singapore's approach to information management: the strengths of a government that could mobilise rapidly, coordinate across agencies, and deploy sophisticated digital tools; and the weaknesses of a system that depended on centralised control in an information environment that was, by its nature, decentralised. Tandoc's research provided some of the most rigorous evidence available for understanding this tension — and for thinking about how it might be resolved in future crises.

Part V: Institution-Building and the IN-cube Centre

5.1 The Centre for Information Integrity and the Internet

Tandoc's most significant institutional contribution has been the founding and leadership of NTU's Centre for Information Integrity and the Internet, known by its acronym IN-cube. The centre represents a deliberate attempt to move beyond the individual-researcher model of academic inquiry and build a sustained institutional platform for the study of misinformation, information integrity, and digital media ecosystems.

IN-cube's framing is itself analytically significant. The choice of the term "information integrity" — rather than "fake news," "misinformation," or "disinformation" — signals a conceptual reorientation. Where the language of fake news focuses on the identification and correction of individual false claims, the language of information integrity focuses on the health of the information ecosystem as a whole. This shift implies that the goal is not merely to debunk specific falsehoods but to create conditions under which reliable information flows freely, citizens have the skills and motivation to evaluate what they encounter, and institutional checks on falsehood are robust and proportionate. It is, in essence, a public-health model of information governance — concerned with systemic resilience rather than pathogen-by-pathogen eradication.

The centre's research agenda encompasses several streams: the empirical study of misinformation circulation and effects; the development and testing of digital literacy interventions; the analysis of platform design and algorithmic amplification; and the evaluation of regulatory frameworks across jurisdictions. By housing these streams within a single institutional structure, IN-cube enables the kind of interdisciplinary collaboration — between communication scholars, computer scientists, psychologists, and policy analysts — that the study of misinformation demands but that traditional departmental structures often impede.

IN-cube also functions as a convening institution, bringing together academics, government officials, platform representatives, and civil society actors for workshops, seminars, and collaborative projects. This convening function is particularly important in Singapore, where the gap between academic research and policy implementation is often bridged not through published papers but through personal relationships and institutional networks. Tandoc's leadership of IN-cube has given him access to policy conversations that would be difficult for an individual academic to enter — and has given policymakers access to empirical evidence that might otherwise remain confined to academic journals.

5.2 The President's Chair Professorship

The President's Chair Professorship at NTU is one of the university's most distinguished academic appointments, carrying enhanced research funding, reduced teaching loads, and significant institutional prestige. Tandoc's appointment to this position — as President's Chair Professor of Communication Studies — reflects both his individual scholarly accomplishments and NTU's strategic decision to invest in misinformation research as a priority area.

The appointment is significant for what it reveals about the institutional logic of Singapore's universities. NTU is a public university, funded substantially by the Singapore government and governed by a board that includes government-appointed members. The decision to elevate a misinformation scholar to one of the university's highest academic positions was therefore not made in a vacuum; it reflected a judgment that research on information integrity was aligned with national priorities. This alignment was not incidental. In the years following POFMA's passage, the Singapore government invested heavily in information integrity infrastructure — including the creation of new government agencies, the expansion of public communication capabilities, and the funding of academic research. Tandoc's elevation was part of this broader investment.

Yet the appointment also created a productive tension. A scholar of misinformation who is funded by the state occupies an inherently delicate position: the same government that supports his research is also the primary wielder of the regulatory tools that his research evaluates. Tandoc has navigated this tension by maintaining strict methodological discipline — publishing findings that are sometimes uncomfortable for the government (the limited effectiveness of correction mechanisms, the chilling effects of fake news laws on journalism) while framing these findings in the neutral language of social science rather than the adversarial language of political critique. Whether this positioning represents a pragmatic compromise that allows critical research to be conducted within institutional constraints, or a structural limitation that prevents the most important questions from being asked, is a matter on which reasonable observers disagree.

5.3 Building a Research Ecosystem

Beyond his own publications and institutional leadership, Tandoc has played a significant role in building the broader research ecosystem for misinformation studies in Singapore and Southeast Asia. He has supervised numerous doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers, many of whom have gone on to academic positions and research careers in the region. His publication record — spanning journals such as Journal of Communication, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, New Media & Society, Digital Journalism, Journalism, and Journalism Practice — has established a body of Singapore-focused misinformation research in the most prestigious outlets in the field, raising the visibility of Singapore as a research site and attracting international collaborators.

Tandoc has also contributed to the development of methodological standards in misinformation research. His emphasis on pre-registration of studies, transparent reporting of survey instruments, and replication of findings across contexts reflects a commitment to methodological rigour that has not always characterised the rapidly growing misinformation literature. In a field where the pressure to produce timely, policy-relevant findings has sometimes led to methodological shortcuts, Tandoc's insistence on standards has helped maintain the credibility of Singapore-based research.

His collaborative networks extend across Southeast Asia, East Asia, Europe, and North America, positioning IN-cube as a node in a global research infrastructure. These networks have facilitated comparative studies that situate Singapore's experience within broader patterns — enabling researchers to identify what is specific to Singapore's information environment (its small size, its multilingual population, its high connectivity, its regulated media system) and what is common to highly connected societies generally (platform-mediated information flows, the social dynamics of sharing, the challenges of correction).

Part VI: Intellectual Positioning and Significance

6.1 Tandoc and the Singapore Media Scholarship Tradition

Tandoc's work must be understood in relation to the broader tradition of media scholarship in Singapore — a tradition shaped by the city-state's distinctive political economy of information. The founding generation of Singapore media scholars, working in the 1980s and 1990s, operated largely within a framework defined by the government: their research tended to focus on media effects, audience reception, and communication strategies, rather than on the political economy of media ownership or the relationship between media and state power. A critical turn in Singapore media scholarship emerged in the 2000s, led principally by Cherian George (SG-H-THINK-15), whose work on "calibrated coercion," press freedom, and the political control of media introduced a normative dimension — a willingness to evaluate Singapore's media system against democratic standards and find it wanting.

Tandoc represents a third moment in this intellectual lineage. He is neither a government-aligned media-effects researcher nor a normatively driven critic of state power. His intellectual project is empirical rather than normative: it asks how the information ecosystem works, not how it should work. This distinction is not merely methodological but has profound institutional consequences. The empiricist can produce findings that complicate government narratives without appearing to oppose the government; the critic, even when producing identical findings, is perceived as an adversary.

Yet the empiricist's stance is not politically neutral, despite its methodological neutrality. By documenting the limited effectiveness of government corrections, the chilling effects of fake news laws on journalism, and the domestic (rather than foreign) roots of misinformation vulnerability, Tandoc's research has introduced inconvenient facts into a policy discourse that has been shaped largely by government assertions. The cumulative effect of this research is to create an evidence base that constrains the government's freedom to make unchecked claims about the misinformation threat and the effectiveness of its response. This is a form of accountability — perhaps the only form of accountability that is sustainable within Singapore's institutional constraints.

The relationship between Tandoc's work and that of Cherian George is complementary rather than competitive. Where George provides the political and institutional analysis — explaining why the Singapore government controls information, how the mechanisms of control work, and what the consequences are for democratic governance — Tandoc provides the empirical substrate: what actually happens when misinformation circulates, how citizens actually respond, and what the measurable effects of regulatory interventions actually are. Together, their work constitutes the most comprehensive scholarly treatment of Singapore's information environment available in the academic literature.

6.2 The Filipino-Singaporean Perspective

Tandoc's identity as a Filipino-Singaporean scholar — born in the Philippines, trained in the United States, based in Singapore — gives his work a distinctive comparative sensibility that enriches his analysis of Singapore's information environment. The Philippines, Tandoc's country of origin, offers a vivid contrast to Singapore on virtually every dimension relevant to misinformation: it has a free but chaotic press, a highly polarised political environment, a social media landscape dominated by Facebook (where misinformation circulates with minimal regulatory constraint), and a recent history of political leaders — notably former President Rodrigo Duterte — who have weaponised misinformation as a tool of political mobilisation.

This biographical background gives Tandoc an experiential understanding of both the dangers of unregulated misinformation (as seen in the Philippines) and the risks of heavy-handed regulation (as seen in Singapore). His scholarship reflects this dual awareness: he does not romanticise either the libertarian or the regulatory approach but treats both as producing their own characteristic pathologies. The Philippine experience demonstrates what can happen when misinformation is allowed to circulate without institutional checks; the Singaporean experience demonstrates what can happen when institutional checks are concentrated in the hands of a government with its own information interests.

This comparative sensibility also gives Tandoc a degree of analytical distance from the Singapore context that locally born scholars may find difficult to achieve. As an international academic working in Singapore — benefiting from the city-state's institutional resources while not fully embedded in its social and political networks — Tandoc occupies a liminal position that can be both productive and constraining. It is productive because it allows him to see Singapore's information environment with the fresh eyes of an outsider; it is constraining because it may limit his access to the informal networks through which policy influence is exercised in Singapore's tightly interconnected elite.

6.3 Practical Implications: From Research to Policy

The practical implications of Tandoc's research for Singapore's information governance are substantial, though the pathway from academic findings to policy implementation is neither direct nor transparent. Several of his findings have clear policy relevance.

First, his typological work on fake news definitions implies that POFMA's focus on "false statements of fact" is too narrow in some respects and too broad in others. It is too narrow because it does not address the full spectrum of problematic information (misleading framing, decontextualised truths, manipulative imagery) that contributes to public misunderstanding. It is too broad because its application to contested factual claims — where reasonable people might disagree about what constitutes a "fact" — risks chilling legitimate debate.

Second, his research on audience passivity implies that counter-misinformation strategies that depend on citizen vigilance — including media literacy programmes that train individuals to fact-check — will be insufficient unless they also address the social incentives that discourage correction. Policy interventions that make correction easier and less socially costly — such as anonymous reporting mechanisms, platform-level prompts to verify before sharing, or community-based correction programmes — may be more effective than programmes that simply improve individual skills.

Third, his COVID-19 WhatsApp research implies that regulatory frameworks designed for public platforms are poorly suited to the private messaging channels through which much misinformation actually circulates. This finding poses a difficult dilemma for governments: extending regulation into private messaging would raise serious privacy and civil liberty concerns, but leaving private channels unregulated means that a significant portion of the misinformation ecosystem remains beyond the reach of policy intervention. Tandoc's research does not resolve this dilemma but documents its dimensions with empirical precision.

Fourth, his comparative work on Southeast Asian fake news laws implies that the effects of regulation depend critically on the institutional context in which it is applied. In a system like Singapore's, where executive power is concentrated and judicial review is limited, anti-misinformation legislation can become a tool of political communication management rather than a neutral instrument of truth protection. This is not an argument against regulation per se, but an argument for institutional design that includes independent oversight, transparent criteria for intervention, and meaningful avenues for appeal — features that critics argue POFMA lacks.

6.4 Limitations and Critiques

No scholarly programme is without limitations, and Tandoc's work has attracted several lines of critique — some from within the academy, others from civil society and political commentary.

The most fundamental critique concerns the boundaries of his research agenda. By focusing on the micro-level dynamics of misinformation — how individuals encounter, evaluate, and share false information — Tandoc's work arguably underattends to the macro-level political economy of information in Singapore. Questions about who controls the media, how government narratives are constructed and disseminated, how the boundary between "truth" and "falsehood" is determined by political actors, and how information regulation serves the interests of incumbent power holders are largely outside the scope of his empirical programme. These questions, central to the work of scholars such as Cherian George, represent a structural blind spot in a research agenda that focuses on audience behaviour rather than on the institutions that shape the information environment within which audiences operate.

A related critique concerns the framing of misinformation as a problem primarily of false content rather than of power. From a critical media studies perspective, the most consequential form of information manipulation in Singapore is not the circulation of fabricated claims on WhatsApp but the systematic shaping of public discourse through media regulation, government communication strategies, and the management of public institutions — what George has called "calibrated coercion" and what the broader literature describes as "soft censorship." By defining his research question in terms of "fake news" and "misinformation," Tandoc may inadvertently reproduce the government's framing of the information problem as one of false content rather than of concentrated power.

A methodological critique concerns the generalisability of findings from survey and experimental research in Singapore. Singapore's population is small, highly educated, and highly connected — characteristics that may limit the applicability of Singapore-based findings to other national contexts. The high trust in government institutions that characterises Singaporean public opinion may make Singaporeans more responsive to government corrections and less susceptible to anti-establishment misinformation than populations in countries with lower institutional trust. Tandoc is generally careful to acknowledge these contextual factors, but the temptation to generalise from the Singapore case — encouraged by the global demand for misinformation research — is ever-present.

Finally, there is a political critique: that Tandoc's empiricism, by refusing to take normative positions on the appropriateness of government regulation, provides implicit legitimation to a regulatory framework that civil society actors regard as a tool of political control. By studying POFMA's effects without questioning POFMA's legitimacy, the argument goes, Tandoc normalises the legislative framework and reduces the analytical space for fundamental critique. This is the perennial tension of applied social science in authoritarian or semi-authoritarian contexts: engagement with the system risks co-optation, while disengagement risks irrelevance.

6.5 Legacy and Continuing Significance

As of 2026, Tandoc is at the height of his scholarly influence and institutional authority. His appointment as President's Chair Professor, his leadership of IN-cube, and his role as Associate Chair for Research at the Wee Kim Wee School give him a combination of intellectual prominence and institutional leverage that is rare for any academic in Singapore, let alone a scholar working on a topic as politically sensitive as misinformation.

His continuing significance rests on several foundations. First, the problem he studies is not going away. The challenges posed by misinformation are, if anything, intensifying as artificial intelligence enables the creation of increasingly sophisticated synthetic content — deepfake videos, AI-generated text, synthetic audio — that will make the already difficult task of distinguishing true from false information harder still. Tandoc's research programme, with its emphasis on audience behaviour and authentication processes, provides a framework for studying how citizens will navigate this new landscape — and for designing interventions that can help.

Second, Tandoc's institutional creation — IN-cube — is positioned to outlast any individual scholar's career. If the centre succeeds in attracting sustained funding, recruiting top researchers, and maintaining productive relationships with both government and civil society, it could become a permanent feature of Singapore's research infrastructure — analogous to the Institute of Policy Studies or the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in their respective domains.

Third, Tandoc's emphasis on digital literacy and inoculation strategies represents a potentially important alternative to Singapore's enforcement-heavy approach to misinformation. His research on "prebunking" — exposing people to weakened forms of misinformation in controlled settings, thereby building resistance to future encounters with false information — draws on the psychological literature on inoculation theory and has shown promising results in experimental settings. If these interventions can be scaled — through schools, community organisations, and public communication campaigns — they could reduce dependence on POFMA and shift Singapore's information governance from a punitive model to a preventive one.

The ultimate test of Tandoc's contribution will be whether his empirical findings translate into measurable improvements in the health of Singapore's information ecosystem. If his research leads to better-designed correction mechanisms, more effective digital literacy programmes, and more proportionate regulatory interventions, then his work will have fulfilled the promise of applied social science in a small, tightly governed state. If his findings remain confined to academic journals — cited by scholars, ignored by policymakers — then his legacy will be scholarly rather than practical. The evidence to date suggests that the former outcome is more likely than the latter, but the path from evidence to policy in Singapore remains opaque, and the political incentives that shape information governance will not be displaced by empirical findings alone.

What is certain is that Tandoc has established misinformation research as a serious, empirically grounded field of inquiry in Singapore — moving the conversation beyond political assertion and journalistic anecdote toward systematic evidence. In a city-state where information is simultaneously a strategic asset and a potential threat, and where the government's approach to information management has been shaped more by political judgment than by empirical analysis, this contribution is both necessary and consequential.

SG-H-THINK-40 | Edson C. Tandoc Jr — The Misinformation Scientist: Singapore's Leading Scholar of Fake News, Digital Journalism, and Information Integrity