Singapore will likely adopt strong laws empowering the government to swiftly disrupt the spread of fake news by made 22 recommendations to deal with the issue. The Select Committee saying that Singapore has been the subject of foreign, state-sponsored disinformation operations.
In the report contained in the nearly 300-page report was a call for legislation to halt the viral spread of fake news “in a matter of hours". The committee detailed the process through which it sought the views of industry players and the public, which include 170 written representations.
The report noted that besides disinformation campaigns, cyber attacks are part of a set of tools that external parties rely on to wage a kind of non-physical or “non-kinetic” warfare. And there have been a number of such online attacks against the country, including the one against healthcare provider SingHealth earlier this year.
The committee also asked the government to consider legislation to disrupt the flows of digital advertising revenue to publishers of online falsehoods, as well as criminal sanctions for perpetrators of deliberate online falsehoods.
Singapore is the latest Asian country looking more closely at "fake news" and social media. In the run-up to a closely-fought election in Malaysia, the government of former prime minister Najib Razak introduced a fake news law that was used to probe his chief opponent Mahathir Mohamad. After Mahathir was elected in May he attempted to repeal the law, but on Sept. 13 the opposition-led Senate rejected that bill.
The Singapore Parliament established a Select Committee on Deliberate Online Falsehoods - Causes, Consequences and Countermeasures on Jan. 10.
Sources: Bloomberg.com, Channelnewsasia.com