Despite a government ruling banning election talk online in Singapore leading up to elections, that very ban may be the government’s downfall.

The Asia Times looks at the ban and the fallout, as Singapore voters go to the polls next week.

New media have opened the political space for opposition parties to promote their alternative economic policies and raise their profile as a “more transparent, more accountable” political option among the younger, more technology-savvy generation of voters, they contend.

Tan Tarn How, a media researcher at Singapore’s Institute of Policy Studies, said the country has hit the “global blogging big league”, citing statistics gleaned from Technorati.com, an independent blogger search engine. Technorati.com recently showed that the names of three Singaporean bloggers ranked among the world’s top 10 most used search words.

Prior to the PAP’s controversial new Internet ban on political discussions during elections, new blog entries with the words “Singapore election” ranged between 12 and 30 per day, with more than 100 new politically oriented entries uploaded on some days in March, Tan noted. More than 67% of Singapore’s 4.4 million population is connected to the Internet, the third-highest percentage in Asia behind only Japan and Hong Kong, according to statistics provided by Internetworldstats.com.

Significantly, the new ban on new media highlights a glaring contradiction in the PAP’s policy rhetoric and its on-the-ground actions. Recent policy initiatives have aimed, at least conceptually, to promote more creativity in Singapore’s still severely repressed society.

However, that drive has not yet translated into more political and social freedoms. The PAP-led government is now in the process of forcing bloggers to register their online identities, stripping online writers of their anonymity and exposing them to possible defamation prosecution for writing considered objectionable by the government. Last year, two bloggers were charged under the Sedition Act related to their online postings.