Featured in The Routledge Handbook on the Rule of Law (Routledge) forthcoming 2023
In May 2019, Singapore passed the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act (POFMA). Yoking theorising on authoritarian rule of law to analysis of political gaslighting, this chapter argues that POFMA undermines both rule of law and democracy in two crucial ways. First, as legislation, POFMA is only legible if read through the distorting lens of state-imposed meanings. POFMA scripts unique meanings for the categories ‘law’, ‘democracy’, ‘statement’, and ‘fact’. As text, POFMA is thus often at an alienating remove from the ordinary meaning of words. And second, POFMA undermines rule of law and democracy by deploying the relational dynamics of contempt and epistemic injustice inherent to political gaslighting, amplifying the expansive executive discretion of authoritarian rule of law.