Behind the 6 blocked ‘S’pore news’ websites: Offshore registrations, a Nanjing firm, a fake address

SINGAPORE – At first glance, there is little connecting the six websites blocked by the Singapore authorities on April 23, other than the fact that they posed as local news sites.

Digging deeper, The Straits Times found a series of links showing a coordinated approach behind several of them and a trail of false or obscured ownership, and similarities to a larger network of influence-peddling operations.

The six blocked sites had been flagged by the Singapore authorities for being operated by foreign actors and having the potential to be used in hostile information campaigns, while masquerading as local news websites.

One of them, the Jiangsu-registered Singapore Times website, had minimal information but listed a 10-digit internet content provider (ICP) number at the bottom of its main page.

Checks showed that it corresponds to the ICP number of Jiangsu Nanfang Digital Technology, a digital marketing services firm based in Nanjing city, Jiangsu province.

According to its website, it offers overseas marketing, translation services, multilingual website creation and search engine optimisation.

A check on Chinese corporate information database Qichacha showed that the Jiangsu firm was established on Feb 18, 2021, with a registered capital of 10 million yuan (S$1.9 million).

It has eight other branches in major cities in China, including in Beijing and Guangdong, and runs several websites marketed as news, including English-language ones like Singapore Times and International Business News, as well as Chinese-language provincial news sites.

One of its websites, China Free Trade Network, included links to a public relations site, which advertises services for businesses and brands to build credibility by putting up announcements on what it says are “recommended” news sources.

The public relations site is run by another company under Jiangsu Nanfang Digital Technology’s executive director and legal representative Wei Zhongyuan, and the news sites it recommends to “enhance a brand’s online influence” are all run by Jiangsu Nanfang Digital Technology.

Not much else is known of the individual, who is linked to some 15 companies, many of which appear to be media-related.

Chinese database results also describe this individual as the editor-in-chief of a news website called Daily Economic, as well as being an independent media personality in the field of finance and economics.

The Singapore Times website describes itself as having “no official background” and belonging to the “International Business News series”. In an article published on its site, it also says it has “high monthly visits, covering global business readers”.

Checks on internet traffic analytics website Semrush, which shows data from the last six months, reflect that the site had about 830 visitors in October 2025, before declining to two-digit figures since January 2026.

As at 5pm on April 24, the Singapore Times said in a statement on its website that it was unrelated to the other five sites that had been blocked, and denied that it “spreads hostile information”.

It added that content related to China had been removed and “would not be published again”, and that it abides by “the laws and ethical standards of China, the United States, Singapore... the Western world and the Eastern world”.

The other five sites – singaporeheadline.com, singaporeweek.com, singapore24hour.com, nanyangweekly.com and singaporebuzz.com – are registered in the Cayman Islands, a British overseas territory.

All five were registered within a 24-second window on March 28, 2021, using a privacy protection service based in Iceland that substitutes a registrant’s information with the third party’s.

This was later updated to Guangdong, China, between April and June 2023, before switching out to the British overseas territory at various points in 2024.

Other identifying information about their owners remain redacted for privacy.

While they posed as unique sites with different domain names, the websites all hosted content taken from mainstream news sites in Singapore and overseas outlets such as the Sydney Morning Herald and the Press Trust of India.

They also featured similarly worded privacy policies that had matching details, such as Dec 1, 2020, being the last time they were updated.

The privacy policies and “about me” sections were flagged by several tools as written by artificial intelligence.

Checks also found that the e-mail addresses listed on the sites were invalid, and one of them had a physical address listed as 123 Orchard Road, #10-01, Singapore 238888, which does not exist.

There is no building that corresponds to that address, and the postal code points to an art school in 31 Orchard Road.

Advancing technology and similarities with a wider web

The Jiangsu company shows similarities to another public relations company, Shanghai Haixun, which was identified by disinformation researchers in 2024 as having links to a global web of inauthentic news sites, said Mr Benjamin Ang, head of the Centre of Excellence for National Security at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS).

Then, Mr Ang and other researchers from RSIS found links between two sites masquerading as authentic Singapore news websites and Haixun, which was later named in a separate Google investigation as part of a network of four firms operating more than a thousand such inauthentic news websites.

These websites were also found to have published thematically similar, inauthentic content that emphasises narratives aligned to the political interests of the People’s Republic of China, said a November 2024 Google report on their investigation.

These two news sites were also later named in a group of 10 blocked by the Singapore authorities in 2024, also for the potential to be used in hostile information campaigns.

Mr Ang said the team found that businesses pay websites like these to publish press releases or favourable stories about their products or services, to make them appear more credible to investors or customers.

“You could call them ‘news for hire’ or as Citizen Lab calls them, ‘disinformation-for-hire’ companies, driven by revenue, not ideology, who tend not to be discerning about the motivations of their clients,” said Mr Ang, who is also a senior fellow at RSIS. “It is possible that anyone from anywhere could use them for scams or influence campaigns.”

Citizen Lab is a research unit based at the University of Toronto that studies and investigates internet openness and security.

Mr Ang said his team has not focused on connecting this new set of websites to any larger network, but they look more convincing than the 10 websites the Government previously blocked in 2024.

He cited more attractive graphics and a lack of grammatical errors, and noted that the sites had also hidden the identities of their true owners by registering domains with privacy protection and using US-based hosting services.

The threat they could pose to Singapore is presently hidden because they appear to contain neutral and non-controversial stories, he said. “But this makes them appear more credible, so that if in future they feature propaganda, false information, or even scams, then it will be harder to distinguish from the ‘real’ stories.”

It costs little to copy a large amount of authentic content that is fact-based, credible, verified, well-sourced and well-written to make a website look credible, Mr Ang said.

“This will pay off in future, because an influence operation can post false, biased, or outrageous stories, which then appear more credible because the website as whole appears credible,” he said.

Dr Gulizar Haciyakupoglu, a senior associate fellow at the Centre of Excellence for National Security at RSIS, added that these inauthentic sites could begin putting up misleading or divisive information after building up their audience.

The Ministry of Home Affairs had said on April 23 that the reach of the six websites that have been blocked was low and that there was no evidence of any attempt to launch a hostile information campaign.

In the statement announcing their move to block the six sites, the authorities noted that most of these websites became active only after the Writ of Election was issued on April 15, 2025, before the 2025 General Election.

On whether this was a deliberate attempt to influence the election, Mr Ang said it is difficult to conclusively form a judgment on this without other evidence.

Research shows these types of sites are prepared for many countries, not just Singapore, Mr Ang said.

“If a hostile information campaign is mounted, it could look like what we’ve seen in cases like the US, where a seemingly innocent-looking ‘news’ website starts publishing false, biased, or outrageous stories that target race, religion, gender, or other issues, which are in turn shared widely through fake accounts on social media and chat groups,” he said.