Mediacorp: Episode on Raw Anal Sex is The Year’s Best “Social Good” Media Piece

Singapore’s national broadcaster recently gave its Most Social Good award to a YouTube podcast episode about unprotected anal sex. In the whole corpus of Singapore’s 2025 creative content, that’s what they chose to validate.

The episode, produced by Dear Straight People’s Unfiltered Gay Podcast in partnership with Gayhealth.sg, opens with one host recounting being penetrated without his consent, to laughter from the panel. Read that again. It moves through a detailed discussion of how to continue having “bareback sex” while managing STI risk, and features a doctor explaining site-specific STI testing and how to order PrEP online because Singapore restricts its sale locally. The hosts themselves acknowledge that unprotected anal sex carries a risk of bleeding, cancer, and a range of sexually transmitted infections.

The award was conferred by The Pinwheels, Mediacorp’s own content creator awards programme, at a ceremony held in November 2025. Mediacorp’s Chief Commercial Officer sat on the judging panel. Mediacorp did not produce this content, nor did it host it.

What it did was evaluate it against competitors, select it from a field of submissions, and declare it the year’s finest contribution to the public good. That is an active editorial endorsement, carrying the full institutional weight of a national broadcaster funded by taxpayer money.

A Regulatory Framework that Stops At The Browser

This endorsement sits awkwardly against Singapore’s existing content regulation architecture.

• IMDA’s guidelines for managed linear television services require content centring on alternative sexualities to carry a maximum R21 rating.
• The Internet Code of Practice lists content that advocates homosexuality among the factors for classification as prohibited material.
• MCI reaffirmed in August 2022, following the National Day Rally announcement on Section 377A, that the repeal did not mean a change in the tone of society, that this position applied to media content policy, and that LGBT content would continue to warrant higher age ratings. The government’s own stated principle is that media content with higher reach and higher impact is subject to more stringent requirements.

And yet this. Why?

Because none of these frameworks bind Mediacorp’s Bloomr.SG content creator network in the same way they bind its broadcast operations. The Pinwheels draws submissions from YouTube creators, and YouTube sits in a regulatory grey zone that IMDA’s linear codes do not fully reach.

Although this is not a technical violation of the law, it is a structural absurdity that ought to be addressed. This loophole allows a state-funded broadcaster to actively evaluate, judge, and award prestige to the very content it is legally prohibited from broadcasting to the public via its own television channels.

The problem is that Mediacorp reviewed it, judged it, and told Singapore it represented the highest standard of social good.

This is not a technical violation of the law; it is a structural absurdity. Because Mediacorp’s Bloomr.SG operates on international platforms like YouTube, it is subject only to the much looser Internet regulations. This loophole allows a state-funded broadcaster to actively evaluate, judge, and award prestige to the very content it is legally prohibited from broadcasting to the public via its own television channels.

The Government’s Other Hand

This pattern has emerged at precisely the moment the government is building new infrastructure to protect young Singaporeans from harmful online content.

Speaking on 21 April, Minister for Health Ong Ye Kung identified algorithmic feeds, autoplay, and unsolicited adult messaging as the specific features of social media that harm adolescents, and said Singapore must act.

A new Online Safety Commission, being established in the first half of 2026, will have powers to order platforms to block harmful content. Singapore has been actively studying Australia’s legislation prohibiting children under sixteen from accessing social media. MOE has been strengthening student cyber resilience.

Across multiple ministries, the stated position is that young Singaporeans need more protection from unregulated online content, not less.

There are more young people on social media than on free-to-air television. If the regulatory principle is that higher reach warrants stricter treatment, then the logic of Singapore’s own content policy demands that digital platforms be held to at least the same standard as broadcast.

At present, they are held to a lower one, and Mediacorp’s editorial decisions are playing in that gap while the government works to close it elsewhere.

A Question of Accountability

This is not the first time this specific loophole has been brought to the attention of the relevant ministries. Concerned citizens have raised it before. Yet the gap between what IMDA’s broadcast codes require and what Mediacorp’s digital arm does remains open.

The question that needs a public answer is straightforward: who inside Mediacorp is making these editorial decisions, under what brief, and does MDDI know what its national broadcaster is rewarding on the very platforms it has publicly identified as the primary vector of harm to Singapore’s young?

The government cannot simultaneously build an Online Safety Commission to regulate harmful digital content and fund a broadcaster that gives harmful digital content its highest commendation.

Either the policies mean something or they do not.