Singapore Says It’s Fighting ‘Fake News.’ Journalists See a Ruse.

SINGAPORE—Terry Xu is an unlikely martyr for press freedom. The Singaporean, round-faced and self-effacing with a worker cap pulled down low over his forehead, spent most of his 20s in blue-collar jobs before joining The Online Citizen, a rare independent news site in the city-state. He first volunteered as a photographer, helping cover successive general elections in 2011 and 2015. Now the site’s editor, he’s not sure he’ll be a free man when the next election comes around, nor whether The Online Citizen will still exist.

The site is one of the few outlets here that challenges the government’s narratives and gives a platform to dissenting voices, in a country where the ruling People’s Action Party has for decades exercised subtle but pervasive control over conversations in the public sphere. That has made it, and Xu, a target. “Any publication that does not run the government narrative,” Xu told