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Got a call from my sister in Singapore about a YouTube video I sent her
I sent my sister a link to a documentary about climate change last Tuesday. She called me Friday and said she couldn't watch it because the video was blocked in Singapore. She said something about it violating their fake news law. I looked it up and turns out the Singapore government has a law called POFMA that lets them order platforms to take down content they say is false. It's not just about obvious lies either, it covers anything they think goes against public interest. My sister got a warning not to share the link again. Has anyone else had family overseas run into this kind of censorship for normal videos?
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blair_allen2mo ago
Respectfully, isn't blocking climate stuff just protecting people from bad info though?
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nathan5452mo ago
The term "bad info" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. 97% of climate scientists agree humans are causing global warming, that's not bad info, that's baseline science. Blocking it because a few loud people call it a hoax isn't protecting anyone, it's just picking sides. You're basically saying we should censor the established view because some people find it inconvenient. That's not how facts work. If we blocked everything that made people uncomfortable, we'd have to get rid of most history textbooks too.
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jesse7731mo ago
That line about "picking sides" really stuck with me. I actually read a study from some university last year where they looked at how people reacted to climate info being blocked. It was wild, most people just got more suspicious of the platform and dug into the conspiracy stuff even harder. So blocking it might actually backfire and make the "bad info" problem worse. I've seen it happen in my own feed too, when someone's climate post gets taken down, their followers just share it in screenshots and act like martyrs. Seems like a better move would be to leave the science up and just flag it with context or links to actual data. That way you're not playing whack-a-mole with info people are gonna find anyway.
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