that Singapore's founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew "had lied about his use of detention without trial from the 1960s onward." Thum claimed that as a result of this, a senior staff member at NUS privately informed him that he "would never be able to work in Singapore as an academic... again". In May 2020, Thum was issued a Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act (POFMA) correction order for his statements on POFMA itself. While complying with the order, Thum has said that he will appeal against the POFMA order in the court of Singapore. Select Committee on Deliberate Online Falsehoods dispute In March 2018, in response to a call from the Select Committee on Deliberate Online Falsehoods for submissions, Thum submitted a paper arguing that any legislation by the Singapore Parliament against online falsehood must also apply to the Singapore government. He cited the government's use of detention without trial between 1963 and 1988 during Operation Coldstore and Operation Spectrum. While the government argued 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 the veracity of a paper he published in 2013 regarding Operation Coldstore and the formation of Malaysia, and questioned his integrity as a historian. 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 conceded that some elements of this paper could have been worded better. However, Thum later claimed that the reports took his words out of context, arguing that "at no point did I accept that any part of my article was inaccurate or misleading". Civil activists groups Community Action Network, Function 8, and Maruah, as well as activists Kirsten Han, Terry Xu, and Thum himself, criticised the open hearings, accusing the Select Committee of failing to adhere to its own terms of reference, and claiming the hearings