Seeing Isn't Believing Anymore: How Social Media is Undermining Courts and Elections

January 6, 2021. A day Americans, till this day, still remember vividly. The United States Capitol was attacked. The cause? False narratives of election fraud, which was fuelled by then-President Donald Trump and exacerbated by social media. This was just one of many instances where untruthful statements led to chaos. Currently, social media is used by more than 5 billion people around the world. While many have benefitted from the connectivity and reach, its low barriers to entry have caused it to become a breeding ground for misinformation and disinformation. Furthermore, many take for granted that all information seen or heard is accurate and blindly believe everything they see. Unbeknownst to them, malicious actors, under the cloak of anonymity, use social media as a pedestal to spread false news – with impunity. In recent years, it has been most apparent in undermining truth-seeking institutions and processes such as courts and the elections. While countries have ramped up efforts to combat the spread of falsehoods through social media platforms, some do fall through the cracks. And when a remedy comes, it is often too late. The damage has already been done.

From Newsrooms to Newsfeeds

Before social media came into the picture, information was disseminated through centralised media, in a one-to-many system. It was a top-down approach. Individuals received information from credible media sources such as newspapers, television and the radio. Legacy media outlets were bound by strict regulations set by governments, and were held accountable for the pieces that they produced. But the picture is completely different now. Traditional media distribution channels have become nearly obsolete as technology permeates society. Social media has become the new normal for news consumption. Anyone with an internet connection can access it, permitting them to produce and consume information twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week – anytime and anywhere. With such easy access to it, it has become a tool that challenges the legitimacy of the very institutions built to establish what is true, and among them, the courts and the ballot box.

Trial by Comment Section

Chief Justice of Singapore Sundaresh Menon, marking the Singapore judiciary’s bicentennial in May 2026, offered a telling observation. Scrolling through social media, he found no shortage of users passing judgement on court verdicts, many of whom failed to read even the case summaries the courts produce. Herein lies the danger. Hidden behind usernames and shielded from repercussions, commentators dogmatise over rulings that offend their personal convictions, presenting visceral reactions through their words that litter the comments section. But courts cannot operate this way. They are impartial arbiters that decide based on evidence and fact, not sentiment. When the public begins to believe that verdicts should answer to popular feelings rather than proof, the foundation of judicial authority starts to crack.

Such pontification remains the exception in Singapore rather than the rule, but the trendline abroad shows where it leads. In April 2026, Minnesota Judge Sarah West acquitted a defendant in a US$7.2 million Medicaid fraud case after a jury had found him guilty, ruling that the state’s evidence was too circumstantial to sustain a conviction. Social media erupted. A prominent activist even declared to a large following that “judges like this are destroying trust in our system”. Within hours, a verdict was made to an audience that read none of the evidence that the judge had spent weeks weighing.

In the United States, the Marshals Service recorded 564 threats against federal judges in fiscal year 2025. By 19 February 2026, it had already logged another 197, targeting 171 different judges. Rulings that contravene the values and beliefs of individuals now routinely trigger waves of abusive voicemails and doxxing. If those who administer justice must weigh every ruling against the mob’s likely verdict, then judgement is no longer rendered in the courtroom. It is rendered in the comment section.

The Election Threat

While social media is increasingly used by politicians to connect with the masses, it has also been weaponised by ill-intentioned individuals to sow chaos among the electorate, resulting in irreversible damage. A prominent example was the 2024 Romanian presidential election. Călin Georgescu, a far-right pro-Russian candidate polling in single digits, surged to win the first round with 23% in just three weeks. However, the election was cancelled shortly after evidence of social media manipulation surfaced. Powered by a coordinated TikTok operation involving 25,000 accounts (including over 790 dormant accounts created back in 2016 and activated only weeks before the vote) and through a Telegram channel, with paid influencers promoting him through seemingly neutral hashtags, he turned the odds in his favour. While the election was annulled, the damage was irreversible. Nearly 48,000 votes were invalidated, triggering a fresh crisis of trust, with protestors carrying a coffin labeled ‘Democracy’.

Closer to home, it has been used as synthetic endorsement for manufacturing credibility that politicians did not earn. In the 2024 Indonesian elections, a deepfake of then presidential candidate Prabowo Subianto, delivering a speech in fluent Arabic circulated social media. The deception was a success. In fact, a survey conducted by the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute revealed that more than one-quarter of respondents who were shown or asked about the video believed it was real. They thought Prabowo genuinely gave a speech in Arabic. As the world’s largest Muslim-majority country, appearing to speak Arabic eloquently was highly prized. Additionally, it has been used to manipulate voters. In the same election, a fabricated audio clip purporting to capture Surya Paloh, a party chairman, dressing down presidential candidate Anies Baswedan was circulated. By making up a scenario where Surya Paloh harshly berated Anies, the creators aimed to weaken Anies’s public image as an independent leader and damage his political credibility. What is truly crucial is recognising the insidious power of these platforms to distort truths in order to sway voters in elections.

But, aren’t there regulations in place?

As technology progresses, and artificially generated images and videos become increasingly realistic, governments have tightened laws rather than trusting platforms to police themselves. In Singapore, acts like the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act (POFMA) and The Administration of Justice (Protection) Act 2016 govern the spread of falsehoods online. Under POFMA, a Correction Direction will be issued if the government finds information spread through social media to be untrue. It legally compels the author of a falsehood to attach a notice to the original post linking to the government’s clarification and leave the post itself standing. If the author refuses to comply, the state will issue directions to the platform to append the correction on the author’s behalf, or in the most serious cases, order it to block Singapore users’ access to the page entirely.

In 2021, The Online Citizen, an independent citizen journalism platform, published claims that police had reprimanded and taunted an elderly woman who was not wearing a mask. A Correction Direction was issued to the site. The site appealed in July 2022, but the High Court dismissed the appeal, finding that the site had published a false statement and that the original publisher could not in good faith have concluded that any reprimanding or taunting had occurred.

Beyond POFMA, the Administration of Justice (Protection) Act makes it an offence to publish material that impugns the integrity or impartiality of a court. The provision recognises that public confidence in the courts is something worth protecting, and that a verdict’s authority can be eroded by insinuation campaigns online. Similarly, election integrity is protected by regulations. Ahead of the 2025 General Election, Singapore enacted a ban on the publishing, sharing or reposting of deepfakes depicting candidates. This is not just unique to Singapore. The European Union’s Digital Services Act holds platforms accountable for the systemic risk their services pose to election integrity, and when far right candidate Călin Georgescu’s TikTok operation threw the 2024 Romanian presidential election into crisis, the European Commission opened formal proceedings against the platform within three weeks of the vote.

On paper, regulations look formidable, fast and far-reaching.

Through the Cracks

And yet, tightened and updated as they are, these laws are not a panacea. Falsehoods slip through them. The most prominent limitation is speed. A correction, however swift, always comes after the lie. The POFMA case involving The Online Citizen and Terry Xu was one of twenty-five Correction Directions connected to the same publication. Nonetheless, the falsehoods continued to circulate. The limitation is most striking in large scale events like the Romanian elections. By the time the European Commission opened proceedings, the Constitutional Court had already annulled the election. These are just two of many instances where legal infrastructures failed to prevent permanent damage in time.

Furthermore, provability is another key limitation of regulations. Acts like POFMA can only be invoked when falsehood can be shown to be false. Claims that can neither be verified nor disproven will not be under the purview of the Act. When an article alleged in early 2026 that two Singaporeans had served in a foreign military, the Government issued no direction against the original source, explaining that it could not establish whether the claim was true or false. As such, however untrue a claim sounds, the regulations are unable to pin it down due to their unverifiable nature.

Conclusion

For as long as most of us can remember, we trusted the information placed before us, above all when it came from the courts and the ballot box. Social media has quietly dissolved that trust. The danger is no longer only that we might be lied to. It is that we have lost the reflex to check before we believe, and believe before we share. The remedy cannot just rest with the law alone. Regulations, however swift, catch the lie only after it has been spread. What remains is the reader. You. Not the impossible demand of detecting every falsehood, but equipping yourself with the awareness that not everything you see is the truth.

Return, for a moment, to where all this began. The Capitol was stormed by a crowd in a country that had transparent courts, free press, and election officials. Every one of these institutions held firm. What collapsed was people’s willingness to believe them. The question, then, is not whether governments can write laws fast enough to keep pace with the technology. Instead, it is whether we can doubt what we see before we act on it. Because seeing, it turns out, was never quite the same as believing. And the distance between them is now ours to guard.