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Other authoritarian governments could see Singapore, a developed society, as a model for similar measures, and use legitimate concerns about online misinformation to deepen control over the internet. The consequences of that could be profound and troubling, balkanizing the internet between free and controlled systems, and denying millions of people its value as a tool for open communication and free expression.

“If we don’t take this seriously enough,” says Julie Owono, the executive director of Internet Without Borders, a Paris-based organization that advocates for a free internet, “we accept that the internet is going to be Chinese- or Russia-like. That would make the internet absolutely irrelevant.”

The Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act—quickly abbreviated to POFMA in Singapore’s acronym-obsessed political culture—gives individual government ministers the power to unilaterally declare online content “false or misleading” and demand that it be corrected or taken down. The law covers anything that can be viewed in Singapore, including posts on social-media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as private-messaging apps, and allows ministers to sanction repeat offenders and make it a criminal offense to finance them.

The government says that the measure is necessary to prevent the spread of the kind of socially corrosive falsehoods that have become prevalent in other parts of the region, including the Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia.

In Singapore, ministers presented their approach as being of a kind with moves in Europe, where countries, including the U.K. and Germany, are publicly seeking regulatory solutions to an epidemic of malicious falsehoods that had skewed public debate. But European lawmakers fretted over the balance between dealing with the problem rapidly and comprehensively and not impinging on individual freedoms. In Singapore, the legislation is worded so broadly as to give ministers enormous power with little direct oversight.

Once the law goes into effect, likely later this year, individual ministers will be able to decide whether a piece of content is “false or misleading” and to issue a takedown or correction order.

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Press-freedom activists say that it is a straightforward power grab; another mechanism for extending government controls into the digital world—one that sets the ruling party up as the sole arbiter of what is true.

“People don’t realize the kind of powers they’re handing to the government,” Xu said.

Given Singapore’s record, that is alarming. Mainstream outlets—most of which are at least part owned by the state investment company Temasek—uncritically present the government’s perspective, while the few independent organizations and journalists are put under constant pressure through regulatory demands, defamation suits, and occasionally criminal charges. On certain subjects, in particular the merest suggestion of financial impropriety by government officials, the state responds with charges of slander and defamation. International publications, including The Economist, have been sanctioned or sued. Xu himself was charged with criminal defamation in December, after The Online Citizen published a reader letter that made unspecified allegations of corruption against senior members of the party.