LIVING SOCIOLOGY2
Part A:
On May 8th, 2019 the Parliament of Singapore passed a comprehensive legislation that is
aimed to combat fake news and shape the Singapore Society by protecting it from the adverse
and misleading effects of false information. The bill was supported by 72 members of the
parliament with only 9 not showing support to the bill and 3 abstaining from the vote (Lee &
Lee, 2019).
The bill came through after several debates and oppositions from the opposition party, who
feared that the bill can be misused by the government to quash critics of the government
(Fernandez, 2019). According to the bill, the arbiters of the falsehood of a news are the
ministers of the parliament instead of the courts, which many feel opens the scope for the
ministers abusing the bill to mislead the people.
The adverse effects of false information can be understood through the ‘Conflict Perspective’
theory of sociology that implies the creation of inequality through a social process that
intends to disrupt the society. The conflict can be caused from a differential access of
information on the media thereby creating a digital divide and thereby causing conflict
among people (Tandoc et al., 2018). This conflict creates social tensions and therefore can be
disadvantageous to the society. The impact of control media and technology acts as a
gatekeeper that filters information shared on a platform, accepting or rejecting the data based
on certain grounds, which in case of this bill is the notion of ‘falsehood’ of the information
(Cacciatore et al., 2016). This provides an enormous power to the institution who serves to
label and categorize information as truth or false, and therefore control what information is
accessible to the public (Reese & Shoemaker, 2016). The fear of the opposing against the bill,
pointing out that the bill gives a big power to the government to control the media, based on
their perspectives, which can often be biased and thus misleading to the people.

+13062052269

info@desklib.com

Fake News Bill of Singapore Government - Living Sociology

Contribute Materials

Related Documents

Sociological Theory : Fake News 2022