What happens when an authoritarian-minded government with abysmal freedom of press rankings enters the growing global debate about social media regulation and the need to curb disinformation?

Not much good, according to human rights groups and civil society activists in Singapore, the Asian nation that has become the latest country on track to pass a law about fake news.

The new bill before the Singaporean parliament, described by the Asia Internet Coalition as the “most far-reaching legislation of its kind to date,” embodies all the worries voiced by academics, lawyers and democracy activists in other countries. As consensus builds that social media needs some kind of external oversight in the wake of scandals such as Russian manipulation of Facebook in the U.S. elections and disinformation leading to mob violence in India — Singapore raises a thorny question of what kind of regulation is enough to preserve democracy from disinformation, and when does government intervention hinder democracy even more?

Singapore’s draft law, the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Bill, tabled at the beginning of April, proposes sweeping powers for government ministers to demand corrections, the removal of content and the censoring of websites and social media pages if the official decides that the offending content is “false or misleading, whether wholly or in part”, and that it’s in the public interest to do so.