On 25 November, the Ministry of Finance issued a correction notice against Progress Singapore Party's (PSP) Brad Bowyer. Bowyer has since complied and added in a link to a government fact-checking site on his post.
On 10 December, Progress Singapore Party released a statement regarding POFMA.
In their statement, they said that POFMA empowers a Minister to declare a piece of news to be falsehood without requiring any justification. This therefore does not measure up to the standards of Transparency and Accountability.
While PSP agrees with the Government that they need to be able to act speedily to curb fake news, they believe that the job of declaring any news as falsehood and to impose any penalties should be done by the Courts of Singapore for Independence.
Of course this has been brought up multiple times from multiple sources. Why are the ministers the ones being the purveyors of truth and dishing out punishments when we have the courts to do that? Many has suspected that the current government will use this new found power to take down any people who oppose them.
This new power has been used on people like Brad Bowyer and Alex Tan from States Times Review. How they will continue to use this new found power remains to be seen. But with PSP's statement, one can only hope for a new Government that truly understands the worries of the people.
