Earlier this month, soon after the Singapore Democratic Party (SDP) announced its legal challenge to corrections issued under the Government's "fake news" law, Facebook, in a separate development, made known that despite widespread pressure, it would continue to allow political advertisers to micro-target and misinform.

While the former case highlighted global anxieties about governments regulating digital speech, the latter underscored what is for some a difficult, though necessary, pill to swallow: In the absence of such regulation, it would be naive to expect big tech to safeguard democracies from the disinformation epidemic.