PM Lee passes 1 million ‘likes’ on Facebook

SINGAPORE — Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong has officially crossed 1 million ‘likes’ on Facebook. As of Wednesday (Feb 17) evening, Mr Lee’s page had received 1,002,837 likes, making him the Republic’s most popular politician on the social networking site.

Mr Lee has also overtaken several world leaders including British Prime Minister David Cameron (with 977,000 ‘likes’) and French President Francois Hollande (with 870,000 ‘likes’).

Having just arrived home from his working visit to the US, Mr Lee expressed surprise at gathering more than 1 million 'likes' on his Facebook page.

However, he trails behind others such as US President Barack Obama, who is the world's most 'liked' politician on Facebook with nearly 47 million ‘likes’, and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi who has more than 32 million ‘likes’. The US population is over 321 million, while India has a population of over 1.2 billion.

Mr Lee made his first Facebook post nearly four years ago, on April 20, 2012. In his inaugural post, he said that he hoped netizens would find his Facebook page “interesting”.

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Since then, he has used his page to regularly update Singaporeans on his activities. This past week, he shared details and photographs of his trip to the United States where he met Mr Obama and other ASEAN leaders at a special US-ASEAN summit.

Mr Lee also used Facebook to thank Singaporeans for paying their last respects to Mr Lee Kuan Yew, following the late Mr Lee’s death last March.

However, not all his posts have been quite so serious. In celebration of Valentine’s Day on Sunday, Mr Lee posted a photo of himself with his wife, Madam Ho Ching. That post garnered more than 23,000 likes.

Since his foray into Facebook, Mr Lee has also started to use Twitter where he has amassed 271,000 followers, and Instagram, where he has garnered 203,000 followers. ASHUTOSH RAVIKRISHNAN