New centre to help S’pore fight online harms gets 50m funding

Service that verifies suspicious content for its users among those supported by centre

- Zhaki Abdullah

Received a dubious text message that you think could be a scam or misinformation? Run it by a new service called Checkmate, where suspicious text messages, images and online videos can be verified via a WhatsApp bot.

The service is one of several supported or developed by the new Centre for Advanced Technologies in Online Safety (Catos), which aims to help Singapore tackle online harms including hate speech, misinformation and deepfakes.

Catos comes under the Ministry of Communications and Information's Online Trust and Safety Research Programme and is hosted by the Agency for Science, Technology and Research. It will focus on building and customising tools to detect harmful content.

The centre will receive a total of $50 million in funding over five years under the Smart Nation and Digital Economy domain of Singapore's Research, Innovation and Enterprise 2025 Plan.

The amount includes a top-up of $30 million from the National Research Foundation to the initial $20 million announced in January.

The increase in funding will help the centre expand its scope to provide a sandbox, or a controlled virtual space where developers can test solutions to online harms in real-world scenarios.