Building Legislative Legitimacy of “Fake News” Laws: A Study of How Governments May Seek to Legitimize Policy Interventions Against Fake News

With increasing fake news, more governments are looking to enact laws to counter the spread of falsehoods online. Such moves however, have been met with much criticism, for their potential censorship of oppositional voices and threats to free speech and media freedom. For such a law to be successfully implemented, this paper argues that it must first be viewed as legitimate. The author delves into the concept of “legislative legitimacy”, binding it to three key aspects of perceived trustworthiness of the authorities, procedural justice, and shared values between the authorities and the people. It then studies how a government may build this legitimacy by focusing on Singapore, a country that enacted its anti-fake news law in 2019, which has been deemed as one of the world’s most comprehensive. A critical discourse analysis of 172 news articles reveals key strategies undertaken in the Singapore context at the discursive, material and ideological levels – pertaining to consistent government messaging in discursive terms, transparency in the material make-up and individual implementations of the law, and an ideological alignment with the people to maintain peace and stability in Singapore – presenting learning points on the legitimacy-building process of such policy interventions against fake news.