A 19 year old French student has been fined 600 Singapore dollars after pleading guilty to public nuisance. In March he filmed himself licking a straw and returning it to the dispenser on an orange juice vending machine, and posted the video to Instagram, where it spread quickly enough to produce a backlash and then an arrest.
The court's handling is more interesting than the stunt. Prosecutors placed the offence at the lower end of seriousness: hygiene was compromised, but no member of the public used the straw and there was no evidence anyone was harmed. His counsel said he had been living in Singapore without family support, had removed the straw afterwards to use himself, and was remorseful. The judge declined probation or a community sentence given his age and the nature of the offence, and took the fine.
Singapore enforces public order and hygiene rules that other countries write down and ignore, and visitors keep discovering that the enforcement is the point rather than the severity of any single act. The gap is not between what is legal in France and in Singapore, since contaminating a shared dispenser is not legal anywhere. It is that one jurisdiction will actually prosecute it.
The wider pattern is by now familiar to every consulate. A short video made to be shared is also a complete evidence file: the act, the location, the timestamp and an admission of intent, published by the defendant. Prosecutors no longer need to build the case, and the months between posting and sentencing are the only part of the process that is slow.