April 03, 2017, 03:04 PM 
Fake news is bad and the Singapore government is going to do something about it.
In Parliament on Monday, April 3, Minister of Law and Home Affairs K Shanmugam named websites All Singapore Stuff and States Times Review as fake news.
He said given the impact of fake news globally even though Singapore has yet to suffer any severe consequences, the government is "seriously considering" how to address the issue and will announce its position upon completion of a review.
Shanmugam said:
"They can cause harm to innocent Singaporeans; they can cause unnecessary alarm to the public; emergency resources may be diverted from legitimate emergencies and the reputation of honest Singapore businesses may be unfairly damaged."
He cited the example of now-defunct website The Real Singapore, which was shut down after it ran a false article among many others claiming that a commotion between the police and participants of Thaipusam 2015 was sparked by a noise complaint from a Filipino family, but that never happened.
Other sites have since peddled fake news and hoaxes, such as States Times Review, founded by Alex Tan Zhixiang, who was also involved in TRS previously and operates from outside Singapore, as well as All Singapore Stuff.
States Times Review suggested that SR Nathan was an unpopular president by claiming a near-zero turnout for the former president's funeral and that kindergarten kids were forced to attend.
An article on All Singapore Stuff in November 2016 falsely claimed that the rooftop of Punggol Waterway Terraces had collapsed, prompting the police and Singapore Civil Defence Force to investigate.
"Taxpayers pay the cost for all this," Shanmugam said.
Current laws are limited in dealing with falsehoods. For example, under the Telecommunications Act, it is an offence to transmit a message knowing its false.
The government, Shanmugam also said, is not concerned with "trivial, factual inaccuracies, but with falsehoods that can cause real harm."
The motivations for spreading fake news, according to him, are two-fold: To make money and destabilise society.
“If not quickly corrected, they can cause harm to Singaporeans, alarm to public, emergency resources will have to be diverted, and reputations of businesses and people can be completely, unreasonably, unfairly damaged. All because some nasty people seek to profit from this,” he said.
He also said: "Fake news today, we must assume can be used as an offensive weapon by foreign agencies and foreign governments... to get into the public mind, to destabilise the public, to psychologically weaken them."
“That’s a very serious threat and it will be naive for us to believe that governments or state agencies don’t engage in this. There is enough evidence that they do.”
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