Comment by gruez
8 hours ago
In what contexts is lying to the public a crime? The closest are laws against lying in police investigations or official proceedings, but otherwise it's not a jailable offense.
And all of this is before you get into the question of whether they lied or were engaging in motivated reasoning. During COVID we had anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers, seemingly without clear commercial reasons to lie. Should those people be thrown in jail as well?
> In what contexts is lying to the public a crime?
This feels like a disingenuous question. I'm not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure that claiming X isn't toxic, when you know that it is dangerous. Public health, frequency, scale of impact (more often, who is impacted that has resources to compete in court) et al are all considerations.
Humans act in their own self interest. Relying purely on individual self interest is a degenerate approach in public health issues. One of the many purposes of government, is to act in the collective interest. eg Typhoid Mary
>This feels like a disingenuous question. I'm not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure [...]
If all you have is vibes, then it's a pretty legitimate question.
>Public health, frequency, scale of impact (more often, who is impacted that has resources to compete in court) et al are all considerations.
That's exactly not how the legal system is supposed to work. Bending the rules just because some defendant is particularly unsympathetic is exactly how you get politically motivated prosecutions and kangaroo courts.
> That's exactly not how the legal system is supposed to work.
It is. This is a misunderstanding of how justice works. People (judges, juries, et al) determine the impact of situations, not machines following abstract rules.
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If you take the post-mortems on the psyops campaigns from our national adversaries at face-value then what they were doing was actually worse.
>If you take the post-mortems on the psyops campaigns from our national adversaries at face-value
Which is a bad premise, because despite how much "russian troll farms" (and now "chinese AI troll farms") is bandied around in the media, it's entirely unclear how big their impact is, if any.