Facebook adds corrective label on user's post under new Singapore fake news law

Usually they care more about internal things than outside. See China.

Isn't this what Sacha Baron Cohen asked for in his speech? That there be state mandated rules on what's fake vs not. I don't think this issue has any good solutions - damned if you do, damned if you don't. The only 'okay' way to solve for this is to crowd-source a variety of opinions on the issue and show what else people are saying about it - not as the ultimate truth, but rather to broaden people's perspective on it that there are different ways to look at the same issue.

Singapore already jails people for being critical of the government on Facebook, so this shouldn't seem like a stretch for them. The news here is Facebook going along with a dictatorship (Singapore's elections aren almost impossible for anyone but the ruling party to win).

They only show the notice to citizens of the country. People from other countries would see their own notices.

Why do you think US corporations shouldn't be subject to local laws when they do business around the world?

I'm pretty sure Facebook had no problem taking money from advertisers when users in Singapore viewed ads.....

Yes; that's how it's been solved in the past. In Google Maps, for instance, disputed national borders will show up differently depending on what nation the system determines the request is coming from. And Twitter hides some feeds in countries where advocating for Naziism is illegal (leading to the funny side effect that even though Twitter won't ban the feeds in the US, some quick queries routed through an appropriate VPN can tell a person whether Twitter has flagged an account as a Nazi sympathizer).

You make it sound like readers will slavishly accept what the government has decided. That's not realistic. They're not censoring so how is this not just more speech? In that sense is positive. Some people will accept it blindly, but then again people accept the most mindless BS because someone wrote it on FB.

I don't mind that the government gives me their view, since I'm free to disregard it, or use it to take a contrary view.

The fact is that people have to learn how to read and think critically, and for themselves, there is no other way.

In the US, we call these bureaucrats "judges", and the falsehoods they might combat "libel" and "defamation". No it's not the same, but this doesn't exactly sound like 1984 either.

Frankly, I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing that there's some form of pushback against falsehoods, even for political falsehoods. The risks are overblown; it's not like we don't already have a system of checks & balances for stuff like this - a little more judicial application might help. People imply that the distinction between truth and falsehood is a matter of opinion, and you're doing that too by phrasing things like "bureaucrats decide what is fake and what is the ultimate truth". And yes: if you distill it down to a completely binary choice, there's probably some token of opinion in pretty much any case that matters. But that's a ridiculous oversimplification. Just because there's some tiny amount of opinion in anything, doesn't mean there isn't a significant portion of fairly objective observation in many statements. The plain facts matter too; not just the opinion, and it's just not all that hard to identify lies regardless of opinion. So: yes there are cornercases, but throwing the whole concept of objective fact out of the window because some small details are unclear is ridiculous.

In any case, content platforms -like facebook- do some of this kind of thing internally, without (as much) oversight, with far more impact, even if it's subtler.

Just because it's possible to abuse censorship doesn't mean every possible quality filter must necessarily turn out horrible. Just because opinions may differ doesn't mean there aren't considerable agreements about what's true (and those truths matter, too!). In terms of risks: there's no reason not to spot check + audit; no reason for the moderation to be secret; no reason for the information itself to be completely suppressed (simply not regurgitated without caveats) - all kinds of reasons why this isn't necessarily a problem, and it's IMNSHO obvious that nowadays noise is far more harmful to rational discourse than explicit censorship; and as censorship goes the implicit censorship of unchecked social bubbles is more likely to be misleading than explicit censorship.

Btw, I don't know enough about the singeporean system to have an opinion either way: but this casual disdain for anything that even reeks of censorship just doesn't make any sense.

Regardless of whether or not the posts contain falsehoods, so far, the posts the government has demanded Facebook to "correct" are all critical of the government.

This should surprise no one. I doubt we'll see the Singaporean government demand Facebook correct fibs made by its own ministers or supporters. It's one of the obvious reasons why a Ministry of Truth à la Sacha Baron Cohen is a dangerous idea.

My step-mother recently had one of her posts marked as false by Facebook. I don't doubt Facebook's accuracy here. For decades she has been into National Inquierer level conspiracy theories but it still felt like overreach by Facebook to single out a particular post. It also implies a degree of accuracy in her other posts, much of which are also nutty half (and often less than half) truths. Facebook has already shown itself to not operate in good faith. It's highly likely that they will make use of their power as arbiter of truth to push their own agendas.

Yeah, it can serve different content based on location just like with GDPR.

Nothing with my Singapore VPN location either.

I'm in Singapore and I see it

What exactly are Zuck's options in this situation?

If anything this shows he's right: look at what happens when you have no freedom of speech.

Yes. https://opencorpdata.com/sg/201004959C

Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21626540