New Naratif says it doesn't allow foreign editorial intervention

The co-founder and editor-in-chief of New Naratif Kirsten Han has said the media platform accepts foreign grant money but denied that contributors influence its editorial decisions.

She was responding to Home Affairs and Law Minister K. Shanmugam's comments on Wednesday at a conference on foreign interference, where he said online news sites that receive foreign funding could be used as tools to advance foreign interests.

He also said Ms Han had stated on video that Singapore has failed compared with Hong Kong because 500,000 people do not march on the streets and that she wants to change that through classes run by New Naratif, which describes itself as a movement for democracy and free expression in the region.

In a blog post yesterday, she said New Naratif is supported by membership, donations and grants. It accepts foreign grant money "following applications through the proper channels". She added: "We don't take money if the funder wants to influence or control our editorial or operational decisions."

She said she and co-founder Thum Ping Tjin "publish regular transparency reports where we openly talk about our achievements and challenges, and share full financial statements so people can see what money we have and how we spent it".

She said her references to Hong Kong in her November 2016 speech, at a forum on civil disobedience and social movements, were taken out of context.

She was reported to have said that a social movement is "all the work that goes into potentially one day having 500,000 people in the streets".

In her post, Ms Han said that her point was that "'500,000 people on the streets' is not a useful KPI (key performance indicator) to use in measuring the strength and maturity of a country's civil society - the communities, the networks, and the solidarity between them are far more important".

"These are the things that you need regardless of whether you have 500,000 people on the streets to protest or not... But you're still going to need a mature and resilient civil society to be part of a functioning democracy."

In his conference speech, Mr Shanmugam said when referencing New Naratif: "Everyone is entitled to their views, however reasonable or unreasonable. My primary point is that - is it right for foreign funding to be received in order to advance these viewpoints?"

He noted that some online news sites tap anonymous contributors, leaving them open to being used as tools by foreign interests to publish inflammatory articles that deepen divisions in a country. "They have no interest in sociopolitical stability within a country," he said. "Their only interest is in eyeballs."