MPs present voted unanimously in Parliament to appoint a Select Committee of eight PAP MPs, one opposition MP and one NMP to study and report on the problem of deliberate online falsehoods and recommend strategies to deal with them. Public hearings The Select Committee convened public hearings from 14 to 29 March 2018, lasting eight days in total, where 79 individuals and organisations were invited to testify. Singaporean historian Thum Ping Tjin submitted a paper arguing that any legislation by the Singapore Parliament against online falsehood must also apply to the Singapore government. He argued that government's use of detention without trial between 1963 and 1988 during Operation Coldstore and Operation Spectrum. While the government has stated that the detainees were part of a communist plot or Marxist conspiracy to subvert the state, Thum claimed that the government has never produced any evidence to substantiate its claims nor have any detainees been brought to trial on the charges they were detained under. Thum argued that these justifications were false claims made by politicians of the ruling People's Action Party (PAP) for the purpose of political gain. On 29 March, the last day of the sitting of the Select Committee, Law and Home Affairs Minister K. Shanmugam questioned Thum about a paper he published in 2013 regarding Operation Coldstore and the formation of Malaysia. He said Thum fell short of the standards of an objective historian, saying that he "ignores evidence which you don't like, you ignore and suppress what is inconvenient and in your writings you present quite an untrue picture". Thum countered that his paper had been peer-reviewed and that no historian had stepped forward to contradict the central thrust of his work. Channel NewsAsia and The Straits Times reported that Thum admitted that there were parts of the paper which he could have worded better, that some of his statements were misleading, and that he had not read nor bother to quote many of the accounts of some communist leaders as he felt that those accounts were unreliable. These included the first-hand accounts of Chin Peng, the leader of the Malayan Communist Party. However, in a subsequent follow-up submission to the Select Committee, Thum claimed that the reports took his words out of context, arguing that "the crux of my original submission was not addressed in the discussion", "the fundamental arguments... were not raised nor challenged", and "at