Singapore issues first correction order under 'fake news' law | Hacker News Reader

Singapore issues first correction order under 'fake news' law

asia.nikkei.com

82 pointsraleighm100 comments

The term "Fake News" is an interesting one.

It first described how news sites would pop up and spread totally false stories that would get social media users outraged to share it to their friends.

However those that benefitted from the "fake news" realised that they could have all the advantage by calling those calling them out by saying "no u"

Fake news in the context of dangerous lies like "You can make a more effective cleaner by mixing bleach and ammonia" is easy to call out.

But political "fake news" is tricky. Those that are the beneficiaries of the fake news are often those in power and/or also have an influence on the media.

So a law like that can easily be used to silence opposition.

It's like anti-terror laws being used to go after vandals. It just becomes another tool.

I find it interesting for a different reason. At the risk of sounding like these fake news peddlers, I see the problem like this:

             BULLSHIT SCALE
   |[------]----------[---------------]-->
   |    |                        |       |
   |   the range people think    |      fake news
   |   news publications         |
   |   operate in               the range
   |                            they actually
   |                            operate in
  as close to truth
  as one could get

That is, "fake news" is only a little bit worse than the stuff mainstream news publishes. It's different only because it dares to make that one extra step, cross the line and detach completely from reality. The goal of both is the same anyway - to drive ad impressions. To me, news publications writing about fake news is like pickpockets getting all outraged about muggers, who don't engage in the fine arts of trickery, and instead just hit their victim and take their wallet. They're just angry because they have competition.

And I don't buy the argument that the contents of news is just innocent bias, and that everyone has one; when one publication makes a square look like a circle, and another makes it look like triangle, then that's taking it a bit too far.

Evidence for my view is evident if you add up all the little things HN readers encounter regularly. For instance, it's a rare news article posted on HN (or in other relevant communities frequented by experts) that doesn't get thoroughly ripped apart when someone posts the original source behind it, or when someone who knows the topic first-hand or second-hand chimes in. Gell-Mann amnesia is a known phenomenon. The fact that you should always review articles quoting you prior to publications because journalists will misquote you, making you look like you believe the opposite of what you do, is a well-ingrained cultural meme, speaking to the ubiquity of the problem. Etc.

Anonymous comments like this undermining trust in the media are actually similar to fake news. One of the Russian government propaganda machine's core missions is to sow distrust of media and government institutions in the west.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/russ...

I'm not anonymous, I'm not Russian, and I provided the reasoning with which I arrived at my conclusions, so that anyone can evaluate it for themselves.

Providing reasoning is not the same as providing evidence. If I reason that the earth is flat because it looks that way to me I'm still wrong. Reasoning that (all?) journalism is one step from being bullshit is not really backed up by anything in your comment other than a claim that other people also think so (or were they also anonymous commenters?).

And to be sure I'm not accusing you of actually being one of the accounts mentioned in the article I linked and I have no way of proving you either are or aren't (or that I am not).

Overall people should be aware of how anonymous opinion is impacting their worldview and that's the crux of the argument in my article as well as the article below which is linked from that article.

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/students-need-l...

I wasn't trying to enumerate all evidence - I only provided an algorithm that others could use to seek out the evidence that justify my belief for me. I still maintain that my conclusion is self-evident if you just look around and start paying attention - but of course everyone is free to disagree with that.

(Also, I drew my diagram the way I did for a purpose. It does not claim "all news is one step from being bullshit", just that "almost all news operate in the range from 'a lot of bullshit' to 'pretty much complete bullshit'". Imagine drawing a normal distribution such that +/- 1σ lines up with [ and ] characters.)

Also, consider Occam's razor. You don't need Russian disinformation campaigns to make people distrust the news; news media do a good enough job of that for themselves.

>> undermining trust in the media

Nah, the media has been doing that quite successfully all on its own for the past decade or so, flying off the rails completely sometime during the 2016 election cycle. Save for WSJ and Glenn Greenwald, there's no trust remaining at all.

It's different only because it dares to make that one extra step, cross the line and detach completely from reality.

I get what your point, and generally sympathize, but unfortunately the "mainstream news" has already lost the plot in what they publish and broadcast with a straight face. The recent impeachment hearings were but the latest example, whereby the video of the hearings completely contradicted the paper headlines in the WSJ and ticker stream on CNN.

The genie is out of the bottle; as in, there is no truth any longer about things far away from you. The only way to deal with this is to become smaller -- smaller in our communities and concerns, and focus on that. Not worrying about national politics, or nonsense happening in faraway countries, but about our own families, neighbourhoods, and communities. The smaller scale will mitigate a lot of the reality distortion that is currently occurring, plus it will make for better living standards all around.

While I would love to disagree, I am slowly coming to a similar conclusion. I have zero influence over decisions made in WH, VA or or other national power centers.

However, I can attend our local council meetings to ensure our neighborhood issues are addressed. Hell, after hearing him, I just found our chief of police is a reasonable guy. It was a shock of sorts.

What's an example of how the video contradicted the paper headlines? Serious question - I found the testimony to largely agree with what they summarized.

> Evidence for my view is evident if you add up all the little things HN readers encounter regularly. For instance, it's a rare news article posted on HN (or in other relevant communities frequented by experts) that doesn't get thoroughly ripped apart when someone posts the original source behind it, or when someone who knows the topic first-hand or second-hand chimes in.

I mean this also might have a touch of selection bias, in that the vast, vast majority of what's posted to HN is either entirely or majority related to technology, which the mainstream news sources are garbage on reporting on in general, and the bleeding edge tech stories that regularly make front page of HN even more so than those.

Fox is generally accepted as the hard Right news source of choice, and CNN the hard Liberal (not Left. Most Leftists hate pretty much all mainstream news.) What does make Fox and the Right somewhat different though is the sheer ubiquity of the Fox network relative to the conservatives. There's simply no news source or viewpoint source if you prefer that's nearly as comprehensively consumed as Fox is for conservatives. Every single conservative I know is deep in that network in one way or another.

This is also playing in the reverse direction, where Fox continues to dig deeper and deeper into the right's talking points and ways of thinking, much in the same way as the GOP has, because anything less extreme than the most extreme is viewed as compromise. Something about the Obama years fundamentally altered the Right. I don't quite know what it is, but ever since 2008, they've been doubling down and doubling down on their most fringe viewpoints, over and over. The Democrats of today act downright Republican simply because the GOP is dragging the entire politic to the right so hard.

Just to be pedantic: Don't mix bleach and ammonia if you want to live. It produces a very toxic gas.

Y'know... can't be too careful with people who might not read carefully ;-)

It does make an effective cleaner but you would have to be a complete idiot to do so.

Very toxic but also very effective? Why not use it outdoors only?

Because there are equally effective cleaners that are less hazardous to your health and the things being cleaned than concentrated chlorine. Sure you could use chlorine as a cleaner but the cost/benefit is not there outside some niche industrial applications where there's some specific pro that makes it worth all the extra cost.

When "fake news" is used dismissively to ridicule once widely trusted institutions then at least it implies individual assessment is alive and well and able to be improved.

When the "intellectually superior" claim to be among the few who can detect "fake news" postings on the web it's time to worry. They can't tell the trolls from the believers so naturally, neither could anyone else EVER attain this skill. Intervention only gets prescribed to preserve their status quo.

For most of the world, yes you are correct, but in Singapore it’s a moot point: any opposition is already quite effectively silenced.

> but in Singapore it’s a moot point: any opposition is already quite effectively silenced

Singaporean here. I don't think this is true, but the "fake news" law allows the government to set the terms for any political mudslinging.

This is great -- American journalists who have been beating the drum for "protection against hate speech online" have a real life test case of what happens when this is implemented, and someone they don't always agree with holds the keys.

I've never understood hate speech laws. Why would American journalists who largely hate the president want to give the government more power to restrict them?

The major news outlets openly have former CIA agents on their staff, people who still maintain secret clearance. Sometimes these outlets are called mainstream media, or corporate media. But in this context perhaps a better name is "state approved media". The state approved media isn't concerned that this is going to come after them. However, it will help clamp down in media that isn't state approved.

Hate speech laws would not proscribe criticizing the President as an individual. They generally proscribe attacking people or groups of people based on protected characteristics such as age, gender, race, sexual orientation/presentation, etc.

> Hate speech laws would not proscribe criticizing the President as an individual.

People often advocate hate speech laws while being under the illusion that they are the ones who get to define what is hate speech and what is not.

There are lots of thorny First Amendment issues in the U.S. around hate speech anyway. It's unlikely that hate speech itself can be proscribed except where there's a call for imminent lawless action (e.g. rioting, see Brandenburg v. Ohio).

Usually where we see it come up is as evidence of a particular malicious intent or hate-based motivation for a violent crime like assault, mayhem, or murder, that increases the sentence applied as a result of a conviction.

Because hate speech laws generally wouldn't cover the President or the things journalists are saying about him. They're not general UK style defamation/libel laws.

Saying about 'him' as today he goes by 'xi'. You just used the wrong pronoun for today and will need to toss this piece of bigotry out. I don't believe this, making an exaggerated point demonstrating how any type of censorship can easily be abused

Given we're now in a hypothetical where a non-binary person is in the White House I think we've collectively advanced miles as a country. Also what HC laws suggested even come close to outlawing accidental misgendering?

My hypothetical was that now the president can claim to be non-binary or whatever gender they want, not that they actually are. But anyone who publicly disagrees would of course be violating anti-hate speech laws

Are you able to point to any hate speech law in existence that covers pronoun usage in this manner?

I mean, I get the concern, there's definitely ways this could go wrong, just like there are ways that many things can go wrong under the law in this country. But as long as there is rule of law (and that's questionable in some places but singapore is relatively good) then any such uses are subject to real judicial review.

That said, remember when two company stole people's identities and sent fake comments to the FCC, and now we don't have net neutrality?

https://boingboing.net/2019/02/22/notice-and-comment-and-lie...

I wouldn't mind AT ALL if those companies got hit with a ~730k dollar file per each one of those fake posts (It's a million singapore dollars).

> this could go wrong

Then scrap the idea, because that "could" changes to "will" on a large enough time frame.

This just clearly gives traditionally influential people a disproportional amount of power over information. All the more ironic considering the usual groups advocating against "fake news".

The companies that you gleefully and probably rightfully try to penalize have large legal departments that can get really bored and will hit you twice as hard.

At this point it is just like asking for it.

Singapore is an amazing country. But its rule of law is very authoritarian. It’s more monarchy than democracy.

Lame. The party being criticized also controls the law that allows them to legally attack those who criticize them.

There are some things to like about Singapore, but many to worry about very seriously. There is no checks and balances there to combat government corruption, and these laws and policies that are generally against free speech and investigative journalism will have long-term devastating impacts (and already have had a nontrivial impact on the culture).

While I don't much like the law either, Singapore has actually been clambering back up the slippery slope and politics is nowhere near as red in tooth and claw as it used to be. Previous opposition politicians who said things the government didn't like have ended up bankrupted or detained without charge for 23 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chia_Thye_Poh

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._B._Jeyaretnam

this makes me feel uneasy.

> "The law also imposes penalties on those found to be purveying fake news through the use of false online accounts. Individuals can be fined up to 100,000 Singapore dollars ($73,000), jailed for up to 10 years, or both, while companies can be slapped with fines of up to SG$1 million."

SG is a small country which can easily be policed, so this probably works for them. I wonder how they deal with meme and parody accounts. (will making fun of people this way now be criminalized?)

Simple, don't use fake accounts? Or if you are a company, don't astroturf.

As for Parody, looks like you are fine. https://singaporelegaladvice.com/law-articles/singapore-fake...

> I wonder how they deal with meme and parody accounts. (will making fun of people this way now be criminalized?)

The Singapore Law Minister has come out and said that parody and satire don't fall under the "fake news" law [1].

Note, however, that this particular law was rushed through parliament despite much criticism. Ministers are empowered to issue correction orders (which must be complied with immediately), and affected parties (which may include parody and satire) are required to spend time and money to go through the court system to dispute the order.

[1] https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/singapore/fake-news-law...

Easy, parody and satire doesn't pretend to be the truth?

It can be very difficult to tell the difference between 'truth' and parody online - (AKA Poe's Law)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

e.g. I do find myself wondering in some discussions on HN whether people honestly believe what seem to be rather extreme views or are simply parodying those views.

It's less difficult when jokes are labeled as such. So I guess satire in Singapore will be fine, but will have to be unambiguous about what it is. It sounds similar to how in civilized places you're supposed to make it clear to the viewers that an ad is an ad.

If there is a difficulty to tell the difference between the truth and the parody, then the parody should tone it down.

What about parody that a reasonable person would recognise as such, but a small number of fools might not? For example [1] or [2]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWfKdKWJEkM

Both videos could be clipped differently, to reveal the fact that we're dealing with parody by e.g. stating so in the opening and closing seconds. It wouldn't ruin the joke. In fact, the only reason not to include clear markings is when you're hoping people will get confused about it.

Of course one could add a disclaimer identifying them as parody - but that response dodges the question of whether those videos should be illegal in the absence of such a disclaimer

In some (if not most) cases it would have my preference the truth would tone it down. ;)

What about something like:

"Angus man who tried to fly drone into Perth Prison claimed Romanian circus stole his chihuahua"

Without using Google - truth or parody?

In absence of punishment for fake news, I'd assume it's parody. The presence of such punishment would let you think, "they didn't label it as parody so either they have lots of money to burn on fines, or it might actually be true".

https://www.thecourier.co.uk/fp/news/local/perth-kinross/100...

Also a creative writing challenge based on combining this with some other headlines:

https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2019/10/creativ...

In this case it turns out to be true. But (absent fake news punishment) in general, you can assume that such a funny-sounding headline is completely bullshit, because legitimate news only hits such headlines by accident, whereas there are tabloid and celebrity gossip sites that produce such headlines on a daily basis.

I get the reasoning behind this, and in some ways I quite like the idea as long as it's in a country with a truly independent judiciary. But my concern would be what kind of legal remedy is open to a small publisher when up against the government. If it's like a UK small claims court, where the idea is to keep legal costs to a very bare minimum, and which allows people to represent themselves in a way that doesn't cripple them financially or legally, then that would be reasonable. But if that's not the case - perhaps someone here can clarify? - then just the threat of legal action could be enough to stifle the publication of politically inconvenient facts.

In the UK (and I'm thinking in most jurisdictions) being sued for libel is very expensive to defend. Defending criminal charges is also expensive. Neither is similar to the small claims track, which is really only aimed at small and simple money disputes.

Anti-"Fake news" laws seem to create a new criminal offence and I thus expect that the costs associated with defending is similar.

Libel laws in the UK are terrible, so much so that they lead to "libel tourism" where rich people try to sue others in the UK courts because the law is more favourable to the accuser than elsewhere, and as you say it's expensive to defend yourself.

My reference to the UK small claims court was simply because it seems like a sensible way of settling differences with as little friction and cost as possible, and I could see that format working to level the playing field between a government and a publisher. It seems unlikely, because that's not usually the way things go, but it would be an interesting way to actually tackle this kind of problem without huge legal fees, rather than just throwing our hands up in the air and saying "free speech!"

Used to be terrible. They were reformed[1] in all nations except Northern Ireland, so now NI is the main libel tourism destination.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defamation_Act_2013

Don't you normally say "countries" (England/Wales, Scotland, NI) instead of "nations"?

(Just curious of terminology.)

I was thinking of the Home Nations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Nations) but apparently you're right that they are more normally known as the countries of the United Kingdom.

Ah, OK. Thanks for the update - good to know.

Singapore size should be kept in mind if and when other countries try and copy this. This can go horribly wrong if the Government is not honest enough.

As a Austrian living in Germany I think we should always keep in mind what our policies and data collections could be used for by the next fascist dictator. Democracy is the art of bringing various qualities together: it should be possible for the people to change who is in power without a revolution if they want to do so; at the same time it should be incredibly hard to get rid of democracy in a legal way or to abuse it in a way that hurts minorities in a nation.

This is a question of resiliance — how good will your system cope when the executive is trying to get rid of democratic principles?

I think nearly none of the modern democracies is perfect in terms of systemic rules and procedures when it comes to resilience. In both the UK and the US you see the institutions struggling and in their struggle the fault lines become visible. Maybe I am just overly cautious or alarmist, but it is incredibly hard (and potentially bloody) to get democracy back once it is gone.

A good system of societal rules increases individual freedoms instead of decreasing them. A bit like roads force you to take certain paths (thus decreasing your freedom), but enable more vehicles to take that path and do so with higher comfort and speed (thus greatly increasing the freedom).

Overregulation can of course negatively impact freedom, but so can underregulation or the inability to enforce rules.

By the time it is implemented things have already gone horribly wrong.

Indonesia (where I live) has been cracking down on “fake news” for a while now[0], to the point of arrests being made. Concerning stuff.

[0] https://www.voanews.com/east-asia-pacific/indonesian-police-...

So I went in thinking this was going to be a massive abuse of power, but it seems... reasonable. Either because it is intrinsically or because of the messed up relationship with the truth most politics seems to have these days.

I for one would welcome a mandatory fact check on all political speech, with clear separation of facts and opinion.

It seems rather alarming to me. A member of the opposition got done for blaming the ruling party for the performance of a government-owned investment fund which is run by the wife of the current Prime Minister[1], and where (according to Wikipedia) the President has the ability to directly hire and fire the board members. It basically bans anyone from ever contradicting the official government position, no matter how questionable it is. Normally, a party which does this would have to worry about the other party getting back into power and doing the same to them, but since Singapore is a de-facto one party state that's not a concern here.

Incidentally, the reason I can't link to a more mainstream article about the ownership of Temasek Holdings is probably that the more mainstream outlets seem to have been strongarmed into pulling them down.[2]

[1] https://www.asiasentinel.com/society/singapores-lee-family-a...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/25/business/media/25times.ht...

The thing with these things is in theory it sounds great, if you have a fully independent checker/person doing the checks.

The trouble is we are human, and no one is truly independent. Put that together with the classic phrase, there are lies, damned lies, and then statistics. Facts can be shown in a way that manipulates, is that ok or not?

Who decides, is the crucial question?

Are you willing to give the same power you want, to tell us what facts are, to your political opponents?

How about instead of endless discussions about gray areas and ambiguities we simply worry only about two categories:

- Clearly a lie and criminally so.

- Might be a lie or not, but out of the scope of this law.

Don't let perfect be the enemy of good enough.

That still sounds horrifyingly abusable which is the exact opposite of "good enough".

Criminalizing "lies" sounds like the exact sort of thing that would be useful to cover up abuses of power. We already saw how "Espionage" was used for undeclared Wars with the Pentagon Papers. Now imagine Cointelpro also being covered or police brutality.

How you will charge external players for their coordinated fake-news attack on USA? Local laws are useless in international space, but they still can be used to suppress local opposition.

Edit: remove "Russians".

Red herring.

Fake news at scale are invented by RF, as part of their Informational War on West. Mentioning of major player in fake news, which produces them on scale with massive government support, is not red herring, because we have border-less Internet.

I'm from Europe. We have euvsdisinfo.eu site here, which raises this issue: https://euvsdisinfo.eu/why-facebook-is-more-revealing-on-nud... . USA just ignores it.

Mentioning "laws are useless because the Russians" is a red herring.

Understood, thank you. Comment updated.

The current situation is good enough.

Maybe, yet there is still a lively discussion whether more tools or actions are necessary (e.g. Cambridge analytica, election interference, pizzagate and a guy storming into the restaurant with a gun based on that misinformation,...).

I think most of that is probably already adequately covered by existing laws, but that selective (non)enforcement is potentially a big problem.

> Facts can be shown in a way that manipulates, is that ok or not?

That's an easy one, yes it is ok. If we just get rid of outright lies, that will do tremendous positive change in the news sphere. Manipulation can be subjective, but facts cannot. Manipulation is best left to the apprehension of the individual end users, because in other case it will just get more intricate and will never be fully caught anyway. Plus the determining of what is manipulation and what is legitimate weighing of facts is always going to be subjective, so there is nothing to do here.

But then not regulating truth is the far easier solution.

1. The sun is yellow

2. The sun is white

3. The sun is green

Which of those statements are false and which are true? Only facts please.

Those statements are not in the form of facts that matter. It is very easy to make an example when you are allowed to make abstract statements without context. Please try to make a statement that matters in any debate, that would change something in a policy or the practical world, and you'll see that it is much easier to reliably and objectively distinguish between which one is a fact and which is opinion/false/etc.

> Are you willing to give the same power you want, to tell us what facts are, to your political opponents?

Not sure what's up with this thought, as it's repeated many times in the comments here.

You don't give power to the opponents, they either take it, or they are elected. They'll be able to make their own laws, or cancel old ones, regardless of what you want or do now.

It's called constitutional democracy. There should be restraints on the power of even an elected government.

> There should be restraints on the power of even an elected government.

It's times like these that I'm glad Singapore has an open and mostly uncensored internet access policy.

As the dominant party in Singapore controls more than two-thirds of parliament [1], they have been able to push through constitutional changes without much consultation [2] — a recent example was the increase in the private-sector requirement for candidates of our Presidency (head of state), and it being reserved for people from a specific ethnic group [3].

Mainstream media in Singapore is highly regulated and mainly spreads the government angle, which leaves the internet as one of the few open platforms for dissenting perspectives to be spread.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/13th_Parliament_of_Singapore

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_Singapore#Amen...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_elections_in_Sing...

I support this idea! We should establish one of these.

We already did.

Pretending to misunderstand sarcasm is not all that funny.

In case you actually misunderstood the post you are replying to, the point was that these checks are not up to the task (as in "what you are describing sounds much, much better than it works in reality. How nice it would be if it actually were like that")

Singapore?

Anyway, we have constitutional democaracy where I live, and almost every article is qualified by "unless law tells othervise". Even speech is restricted, you can't say anything you like in TV, it's regulated and has an oversight bureaucracy. It's just made so that law is not targeted at any particular party, but on particular behavior.

Who decides, is the crucial question?

The fact that we have courts of law where judges routinely make decisions about difficult, gray area questions, tells me that this is a solved problem.

I can imagine a special court (or board or whatever; just as long as it falls under the judiciary branch and is therefore independent) set up to make quick rulings. There should of course be a way to appeal the rulings to a normal court.

And are those courts used for deciding who to ban/silence on twitter/facebook/instagram?

I don’t think I understand the question. Private entities obviously still get to decide what kind of content they wish to disallow.

A political speech is opinion. Some of these opinions may have been proved incorrect in the past but not everyone obviously agree on that.

A mandatory fact check (by whom?) will end up suppressing 'incorrect' opinions and thus limit choice to one or two 'approved' candidates. (which is not far from what the Chinese government wants to do when it says that HK candidates must be approved first)

Things like this usually start out helpful and useful, but over time it gets harder and harder to keep them from turning into something sinister. Most people aren't worried about the first use of a law like this. They're worried about the 100th, the 1000th, etc.

Aren't there just too many cases where this doesn't happen to make this appeal to probability flawed?

For example, hate speech laws in Canada (or many other countries), or anti-discrimination laws? While they might have their detractors, it's a stretch to claim that they (in particular) have led us to a freedom apocalypse.

Singapore is effectively a single party police-state. The only difference between SG and China, is that the PAP is in many ways, much more benevolent than the CCP (and economically, SG has a weird form of economic libertarianism). The ‘fact’ in this instance is mostly reasonable, but still open to a fair amount of interpretation. Before you celebrate a government seizing power, ask yourself if you’d like your political opponents to be wielding it, because they inevitably will be.

Singapore is pretty authoritarian but to call it a police state goes way too far. The comparison with the CCP is also honestly ridiculous. A more accurate parallel would be with Japan, with the almost unbroken run of LDP governments since the US occupation in terms of one party rule, but with a real and effective opposition. You could also look at other cities, albeit ones that are parts of, rather than constitutive of states, like San Francisco, which has been ruled by Democrats for longer than Singapore has been independent.

Have you ever been to Singapore? It's hard to change views, but I'd like to leave this article with you [1]:

> For example, a friend (a German national currently working in Washington) referred off-handedly to Singapore as a “police state” in a recent personal email. (She has never been here.) [...] That’s not all that perplexes Americans and some other Westerners. Singapore is a “police state”? If so, well, where are the police? One hardly ever sees one, and one never sees a uniformed policeman on a beat on the street. There is no visible acute poverty here, no beggars on the street, no evidence of homelessness, no gun violence, no graffiti, and women can walk alone at all hours of the day and night anywhere on the island without having to worry about being accosted.

They say if you want to see a policeman, go to the malls and find one of the cardboard cutouts.

[1] https://www.the-american-interest.com/2019/11/21/the-puzzle-...

Does anyone know how this law works with Twitter where there's no edit button and no guarantee (or tbh likelihood) that the correction goes as viral as the incorrect statement?

> Does anyone know how this law works with Twitter where there's no edit button and no guarantee (or tbh likelihood) that the correction goes as viral as the incorrect statement?

The tweet would most likely have to be deleted to comply with the initial order. If the poster contests the order in court and wins, they'll have to repost it.

> Opposition politician

What a surprise.

the obvious fake news don't make me feel nervous, those selectively partial true ones do.

The obvious fake news makes me nervous because it's so widely believed. I expect the selectively partial truths to be hard to deal with, but if people can't even reject the obviously fake stuff, they don't stand a chance on the hard cases.

Hence "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth" being used for testimony in court cases.

A fact that needs to be brought up every time this issue is discussed: America and most Western countries already have laws banning certain forms of fake news. Ie, libel and slander. We already have legal systems that we trust and empower to determine whether specific allegations are "fake news", and to enforce punitive penalties against those spreading these fake news... in libel and slander cases.

What Singapore is doing isn't completely new - it is simply scaling out laws that already exist in most Western countries. I have yet to hear an explanation on why libel/slander laws are good, but generic "fake news" laws are bad

Complete and utter lies. Singapore long has had abuse of libel laws to stiffle criticism. Stow the anti-colonial "homegrown dictatorship is better" whataboutism about how it is so unfair that they can't get away uncriticized for repression.

Civil unknowing defamation is a thing in Singapore law. In contrast US and others exclude good faith and lack any criminal defamation in the first place. Even if doing away with them is radical they are sharply limited to prevent abuse. Public figure abuse? They are covered less such that actual malice AND harm must be proven. Calling them the same is disingenuous.

> Stow the anti-colonial "homegrown dictatorship is better" whataboutism about how it is so unfair that they can't get away uncriticized for repression.

You're responding to something I never said. I suggest re-reading my post and responding directly to the part you disagree with.

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