Ho Ching goes “fangirl” over Critical Spectator, shares 21 articles and posts written by him in just over an hour

SINGAPORE — Mdm Ho Ching, former CEO of Temasek Holdings who is well-known for her excessive posting on social media, just went “fangirl” on Michael Petraeus or his online persona, Critical Spectator (CS) by sharing 21 articles and posts written by the Polish blogger in just over an hour on Saturday (26 Nov).

Mdm Ho, who is the spouse of Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, had run Temasek for over 18 years before stepping down in October last year.

Currently, she assumes the position of Chairman at the Temasek Trust which is headed by a wide spectrum of talented leaders, such as Mr Benny Lim, former Director of the Internal Security Department and Mr Desmond Quek, former CEO of SMRT.

The posts shared by Mdm Ho on her Facebook page, cover a wide range of topics but are largely positive about the Singapore government, Temasek and Mdm Ho.

The links to Mdm Ho’s posts and CS’ topics are as follows:

1. Singapore has the best education, government, and the most productive labour in the world
2. Disposable income in Singapore surges by 10 per cent
3. NUS gives better job prospects than Yale Princeton, LSE
4. Singaporeans richer by 103 billion as property ownership protects wealth over inflation
5. Defend Temasek over failed FTX investment (With Mdm Ho’s comments)
6. Defending Mdm Ho Ching and Temasek on the failed FTX investment (With Mdm Ho’s comments)
7. FTX hacker dumps ETH
8. Surge in Shopee value
9. Questions on Binance
10. Singapore has the best education, government, and most productive labour in the world (repeat post)
11. Trump learning from Singapore on execution of deal dealers
12. 40 per cent jump in SEA Ltd. value
13. Comments on Singapore’s GST hike
14. Post referring to Asst Prof Jamus Lim as “Shameless Jamus” on his speech during the GST debate (With Mdm Ho’s comments)
15. Why British and Opium Wars are relevant to Singapore
16. MHA’s comments on Richard Branson
17. 62 per cent of respondents felt it is important to safeguard definition of marriage
18. Nanyang Technological University (NTU) ranks 1st in the world for five subjects
19. Job market stable in Singapore
20. Defending the issue of child births in Singapore
21. Advocating death penalty for cases of grievous abuse of foreign domestic workers (With Mdm Ho’s comments)

The lengthy comments by Mdm Ho which went with the Facebook shares, would somehow suggest that these postings were not done automatically via a bot.

CS whose real name is Michał Piotr Pietrusinski, who writes for Vulcan post, has been featured on CNA — which is wholly owned by Temasek via Mediacorp — in 2019 as part of Singapore’s alternative media.

His posts are largely critical of the Singapore opposition and civil activists. As seen in his posts on Associate Professor Jamus Lim, CS’ posts are often tainted with character assassinations and elements of “dog whistling”.

His Facebook page was previously taken down soon after TOC editor, Terry Xu filed a police report against him during the last General Election in 2020 after he made several posts against candidates contesting in the election.

However, CS’ Facebook page returned a month later.

On 8 July, a Facebook spokesman said that the company has taken action against several pages and accounts in Singapore for policy violation. He said, “This is based on the violating behaviour of these accounts and pages and not based on the content they posted.”

In regard to Temasek and Facebook but with no connection to CS, Temasek joined Facebook (now Meta)’s Libra association which was pushing its own cryptocurrency. Facebook announced in 2019 that each of the partners will inject an initial US$10 million so Libra has full asset backing on the day it opens. However, Diem (formerly Libra) has dropped the plans of its cryptocurrency and turned to apply as a money services business

On the same evening, Mdm Ho did the same for Ms Denise Phua, Member of Parliament for Jalan Besar GRC by mass sharing 20 of Ms Phua’s Facebook posts within a short time span of 20 minutes.

For the past 7 days, Mdm Ho had posted an average of 80 posts a day on her Facebook page.

If we were to go even further back, she had made a total of 14,860 for the past year which is about 40 posts a day.

A huge increase from when Mdm Ho was the CEO of Temasek where she made only 6,712 posts in the year before she stepped down.