Last week, Facebook made its first concession to Singapore's fake news law by denoting a post that the government said contained false information. However, with other regimes around the world grappling with the problem of how content is regulated online, there's a chance that the platform may have opened a door that it will be unable to ever fully close again.

According to the BBC, the post in question was from the news site States Times Review, which was updated with this note from Facebook following a complaint from the Singapore government: "[Facebook] is legally required to tell you that the Singapore government says this post has false information."

While the platform was complying with the conditions of Singapore's fake news law, which says that the government can order platforms to remove statements that it believes to be false or against the public interest, it may have come at a cost.

Elizabeth Harding, a shareholder with Polsinelli, called Singapore's fake news law "really broadly drafted." Beyond just posts, the BBC reported that the law is also applicable to chat and social media groups, even those with end-to-end encryption. In other words, Facebook may have just set a very high bar for itself.

"I think you run the risk of once you acquiesce to that kind of censorship in one country, it's very difficult to argue against it in other countries that decide to bring similar laws," Harding said.

But there may not be too many countries lining up to follow in Singapore's footsteps. In the United States, for example, there are significant cultural differences that could make passing such a law not only unlikely, but also very difficult to enforce if and when the time came.

Jarno Vanto, a partner at Crowell & Moring, said that companies who want to operate in foreign territories such as Singapore often have to make concessions or compromise with local laws. If social media platforms attempted to push back against the fake news law, they could find themselves unable to do business inside the city-state.

In America, however, a company such as Facebook might have a more obvious form of legal recourse.

"It would be a gigantic First Amendment issue in the U.S and a huge political issue as well because fake news probably depends on which side of the aisle you're looking at the issue from," Vanto said.

But the U.S. doesn't seem interested in expanding the protections it affords social media companies outside its borders. In October, members of the U.S. House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee expressed concern over language similar to that found in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects social media entities from liability for content posted to their sites, appearing in trade agreements.

Vanto said the protection afforded under that law is what allowed social media companies to grow, but Harding raised the possibility that a technical solution to the problem of fake news may ultimately be more effective than a regulatory one. Still, putting additional pressure on entities such as Facebook to come up with solutions or procedures that allow them to more effectively root out questionable content may have its own dangers.

"You then have a private company essentially policing what people see and I feel like that leads to all sorts of issues as well," Harding said.

Theoretically, deploying a technical solution such as an algorithm or piece of code would also likely require a working definition of what exactly constitutes fake news. In Singapore, the government sets that standard, but in America the issue may be clouded by partisan politics.

"Debating about what is fake news is a political debate rather than the government telling a private party what they are posting is fake news and imposing thereby an obligation to delete or to limit certain content," Vanto said.