News this week included: Ong Ye Kung on balancing technological surveillance with privacy concerns; Vivian Balakrishnan on keeping the Malacca Straits open; Singapore and Malaysia emphasise diplomacy and energy resilience amid Middle East conflict; “No room for reactive governance”, says Chan Heng Kee, new civil service head; SGX proposes stricter KPI and executive pay disclosure rules; good summary of that Bloomberg trial’s hearing by TOC; Singapore executed a man for trafficking weed; the UN’s human rights chief expresses concern about the continuing spike in executions for drug-related offences here; one in three new lawyers may quit within three years due to workload, workplace culture, and mentorship gap; activist Kokila Annamalai responds to her POFMA charge; a 40-year-old jailed after assaulting his 74-year-old father and repeatedly locking him out of their flat; JC student suspended after allegedly trying to film females in a women’s toilet on campus; longer waits for driving lessons and tests; more women in their 40s giving birth; CNA feature on Singaporeans who left the corporate world to become farmers in Johor; the Singaporean temple going viral amongst Thais looking for love; open-concept massage establishments will no longer be exempt from licensing; and two cockerels chasing each other across a busy road narrowly avoid a passing car.
Below are the issues we chose to explore in more depth.
Society: Slopaganda
“Wake up, America, open your eyes to the devil’s design,” goes a rap song about Israel’s apparent ultimate ambition: to nuke the US. Its music video begins with an Iranian MC dressed in fatigues in a war-room and ends with a shot of Americans in chains in front of a burning Golden Gate bridge. The words are spit relentlessly: Israeli deception; American destruction from Indonesia to Panama; and elite protection and privilege, starring Jared Kushner, Jeffrey Epstein, and others. All told through cutesy Lego characters, and all the product of generative AI (GAI). “The subject matter is deathly serious—international war, unfolding in real time, killing thousands—yet the visual vocabulary is preposterously trivializing,” said The New Yorker. (Its creators told the magazine they’re Iranian students.)
In case you missed it, the ongoing slopaganda war is perhaps as important, and certainly more entertaining, than the actual one. (Slop is a subset of GAI.) For those who like voluptuous blondes in tight uniforms, enter Jessica Foster. She accumulated over a million followers on Instagram through photos of herself in proximity to weapons and their masters, including in the Oval Office. She’s “the apotheosis of what MAGA fantasizes about, all packed into one channel, but it’s obviously AI”, an interviewee told The Washington Post. Meta removed her account, though she’s just one of many AI-generated sexy female soldiers—American, Iranian, you name it—fuelling the war machine and grotesque manosphere fantasies.
Indeed, the intersection of war, feminism, and sex appeal is perhaps the most troubling form of slopaganda. In “The New Era of War Propaganda”, Alice Cappelle proposes three evolutionary stages: the feminist push for military inclusion; the military’s “girlbossification” (in the 2010s); and today’s “female war-influencers in a post-truth world”. In the last two decades, feminism has been reduced by politicians, Cappelle says, to “a buzzword to manufacture consent for more and more interventions, more and more death of women, but also destruction of their homes, their universities, their schools, their hospitals, and workplaces.” Foster was ultimately tied to an Only Fans account. Notions around online entrepreneurial autonomy and farce complicate the issue. “And that's precisely what makes this form of gendered war propaganda so powerful. It escapes criticism because it constantly flirts with irony, with the possibility that it is not something to be taken seriously,” said Cappelle.
Wonks who worry that the zone is being flooded with brain rot should be more concerned that their talking heads will one day be replaced by GAI. USA TV Digital, a relatively small “digital creator” with 12,000 Facebook followers, wants to appeal to a leftist literati with the patience to sit through 20-minute audio diatribes. Welcome to political pontification with AI Bill Clinton. In “Most people DON’T REALIZE Trump’s Ceasefire is WORSE Thank You Think!”, a single, static visual of the 42nd US president accompanies his signature, ArkLaTex Southern drawl. The machines have even replicated his signature self-regard, as he pats himself on the back for his negotiation nous during the Dayton Accords, before asserting: “An open-ended ceasefire, with no clear terms, gives the other side exactly what they need most: time.” Leon Perera, former MP, told Jom he “found the analysis fascinating as an example of applied IR theory. I watched to the end (I rarely do).”
Jo Teo, physicist and commentator, said that: “2025 was the year of TikTok protests, 2026 is shaping up to be the year of AI slop warfare”. Ahead of GE 2025, the government banned “deepfakes of candidates during elections”. Given that AI offers a leg up to under-resourced adversaries, should we expect even more sophisticated laws by 2030?
Some further reading: “Slopaganda: The interaction between propaganda and generative AI” by three media scholars. “In summary, slopaganda has unique features (targeting), unique magnitudes of features (scale, scope, speed), and unique qualitative improvements (persuasiveness) that together make it distinct from any prior form of group influence strategy…By its effects on individuals, slopaganda poses challenges at a group level, which can only be addressed by new solutions and not those that may have worked with earlier manifestations of political rhetoric and propaganda.”
Society: Four times the power
The Labour Day Rally 2023, the first to be organised by advocacy group Workers Make Possible (WMP), was unique for a few reasons. It was not fronted by any political party but was a genuine ground-up, activist-driven event. It championed the rights of all workers, regardless of nationality (some previous events involved worrying xenophobia amid calls for job protection). “The People’s 15 Demands for Labour Day” included stopping the GST hike while implementing a 2 percent wealth tax on Singapore’s richest 1 percent; a minimum wage for all; and ensuring all workers have enough rest. A nurse, community worker and researcher, F&B worker, and food delivery rider shared their stories with Jom.
