How about “Climate change is a hoax”?
That’s kind of like “30% of the population is female” – obviously false, but difficult to prosecute. How do you prove that they are knowingly lying?
I suppose they’d have to show the person knew and believed in climate change, not just that they were ignorant. But perhaps through leaked emails, investments, whatever… basically catching them in a lie, not just a mistaken belief. Not every false statement is a lie; there needs to be the provable intent to deceive.
Random Joe Republican small-town councilmember: “Climate change is a hoax!” They probably never looked into it and don’t know any better, and who would bother prosecuting them anyway.
Head of the EPA with a history of working in the energy industry: “Climate change is a hoax!” Now, it’s not the job of the courts to decide science, but if he can be shown to have studied climate change, acted to change public opinion against the public interest despite private actions in line with belief in climate change, etc., there might be a case. It would not be easy by any stretch, and any outcome would still be controversial – probably more so than OJ.
But for every difficult, complex situation, there are a dozen politicians with bald-faced lies about themselves or their policies that could easily be fact-checked. As with any check and balance, the purpose isn’t to silence, but to moderate – holding politicians to a standard of behavior and truthiness at least equivalent to that of the media, attorneys, advertisers, businesspeople, etc. Why should politicians get a pass from reality just because they hold office?
In Singapore there was a history of using defamation lawsuits to control opposition to the government. What they would do is sue anyone who made negative claims about government officials whether in the media or opposition politicians. Since the government controlled the courts the officials would win and since government officials had important reputations then damages would be very high. The first politician to defeat a ruling party official in an election was handled this way.
Again, that depends on the laws in the Country. Some countries, the court are of the opinion that a reasonable adult Person able to Dress themselves alone and be out in the public unsupervised should know that 1+1=2, and that climate Change is real, given that there has been one or two articles in the News recently. (or a couple of thousands in the past decades).
And the law doesn’t Need to define a “lie = intent to decieve”, the law can define a lie as “Factually wrong Statement” regardless of intent and defamation as “… with intent to injure the Person” and fraud “… with intent to deceive to Profit”.
A lot of People would argue against that - the whole current process of justice relies heavily not only on confessions (problematic because can be coerced), witnessess (problematic, see the Memory threads) or plea deals (problematic because undercutting proper justice) - but on factual evidence, that has been proven by science. The Police lab takes Fingerprints and then Arrest the Person Fitting the profiles, and the court accepts it as damning evidence - because science has proven Fingerprints to work in that respect.(And is currently revising the process because of Problems with the old method).
Recently, further Research has shown that most of the arson convictions in the 80s and 90s based on experts testimony was based on wrong theories about fire.
And in the case of the EPA, the whole Job of the head is to work with science, so he should understand it. Showing not just an ignorance but a wilful mis-understanding makes that Person unfit for the Job in my opinion. (If it were ignorance, the assistant would sit the head down with a Folder “Introduction to climate Change for dummies” and come back the next day. Wilful ignorance means ignoring it on purpose for Money.)
Who can /should sue the Head of the EPA for incompetence on the Job as evidenced by his wilful ignorant Statements is another area, though.
But how do you draw that line? What if the prosecutor has an e-mail from the politico saying he thinks the treaty is neutral in effect? Why shouldn’t the prosecutor prosecute?
And what Attorney General’s office is in charge of the prosecution? Should Attorney General Loretta Lynch have brought charges against Donald Trump for lying during the recent campaign? How would that look: Obama’s AG prosecuting the Republican candidate? Or should AG Sessions now be charged with investigating Trump and Clinton?
I’m not convinced. A high level of corruption, for instance, has been found unavoidable for a long time (and still is in many countries), but is now considered unacceptable in most modern countries. It seems to me that it’s a matter of expectations. We don’t accept anymore that a politician steal the money, but we accept, and even expect that he will distort the truth for his own or his party advantage, instead of acting as we would expect from all other people we entrust to make decisions on our behalf, by “reporting” to us in an as objective and truthful manner as possible (which wouldn’t prevent them from having strong opinions about political goals and about how to go there).
I can perfectly envision a democracy where the public opinion wouldn’t find acceptable that an elected representative highlights his successes while hiding his failures, denigrates baselessly his opponents, etc…and where for politicians, behaving like ours very blatantly and obviously do would be a sure recipe for not being elected ever again. Truth wouldn’t even need to be enforced, it would just need to be expected for this to change.
Currently, there’s no advantage in politics in being truthful, but the blame lies on the electorate that accepts this situation. The older I get, the less I understand how we can still accept such an attitude from people we choose to represent us.
The fact is that this is a feature of authoritarian governments. It basically makes it a crime to say things the government doesn’t like.
Who controls prosecutions for lying? The powers that be. And it turns out that the powers that be never prosecute their own for lying, they only prosecute enemies of the regime. This is true even if it would turn out that the enemies of the state that they prosecute really were factually guilty of saying untrue things.
For what it’s worth, those laws are a joke, and advertisements always lie.
First, it’s not helpful for the current discussion if you don’t read previous points, examples and arguments.
Second, it’s also factually not correct. Yes, authortarian govt.s, dicatorships and ideological govt. did and do censor press and people.
But the basis is not “truth” or facts. The laws used for censorship are usually either:
Insulting the Great Leader, or the honor of the country (e.g. in Turkey, any mention of the Armenian genocide is taken to a defamation of Turkish honour; any negative facts about Erdogan are insults)
deviating from the official party line / religion = being a heretic.
Then there’s the Stalin variant: anybody who insults, disappoints or is perceived as threat to the Leader - disappears. No law necessary if the power is there.
That’s not true. Laws about what is allowed and what is forbidden in advertising vary from country to country, and similar, their enforcement. If the wording of the law is vague, and the agency that controls it has a shoestring budget with a handful of employees, or the process of finding and fining one ad. takes three years - then it’s pretty toothless.
If the law is worded specifically, the agency is fully equipped and acts within a month at most (and the fines hurt) - then ads are more truthful.
It’s good for news consumers to read a whole newspaper article or even watch an entire video story from a halfway decent source. Better yet, from 2 or 3 different sources.
But now we can all watch video clips a la carte. Just the bare soundbites with no curation. That’s supposed to be an advantage of the interwebs but I think a little context thrown in–even if it’s 2nd rate journalism-- is better than a flat 12 second clip on it’s own with no framing of the story behind the soundbite.
Let me introduce you to the Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act, banning the advertising of cigarettes on television and radio starting on January 2, 1971. Billboard tobacco ads were banned as of 1999. Nor can anyone misrepresent a product’s features in advertising. Commercial speech is not protected.
On the subject of political speech, I’d rather see lying politicians called out by the media and by their opponents rather than trying to regulate what they’re allowed to say. I do think, though, that there’s value in enforcing a clear distinction between news and opinion on broadcast and cable media, and that programming represented as news should be held accountable to reasonable standards of accuracy in the public interest. It should be an offense to knowingly misrepresent material facts on a news broadcast for partisan reasons. In order for democracy to function, people who are ultimately going to participate in the democratic process need trusted and reliable sources of information.
This is one of a number of issues where what it really comes down to, is “yeah, but how exactly are you going to do that?” Many people have pointed out examples of how in order to go after one kind of political lying, you mechanically have to create processes which destroy or severely limit other systems and freedoms which you don’t want to affect. We accept a certain level of pretty much ALL crime, not because we are okay about it, but because there’s no way to stop all of it without sacrificing everything else.
I’m often reminded of a science fiction movie I saw on TV back in the 1970’s. A space station/colony had become an independent “country” in it’s own right. One of the Earthbound nations launched a Weapon of Mega Mass Destruction into orbit, and the Space Nation decided to intervene, and captured it. Then they held a formal live debate, over what to do with it. The interesting part of the story, was that they had a computer system “ap” which automatically labeled what each human debater said as being true, false, misleading, appealing to emotion without factual support, and so on, which would appear AS THEY WERE SPEAKING in a crawl at the bottom of the screen.
That would be fabulous to have, but again, difficult to set up, even now. We wont be able to do anything like that, until true Artificial Intelligence exists, and is trusted.
We do. It’s called defamation and is handled by civil courts.
If you penalize statements with factual content, politicians would say virtually nothing that could be factually evaluated. That would be a very bad thing.
It gets back to framing the question. If the idea is that some people have an exaggerated view of the threat of AGW, and try (consciously or unconsciously) to exaggerate the threat and/or underplay how expensive (perhaps impossibly so in the real political world in any country) to address it with CO2 reductions, that arguably is kind of a hoax. Few here might agree that that’s a big problem with this issue, but it’s not provably false.
I think you’d need further clarity as in answers to a series of questions which pinpointed that the speaker claimed eg. it’s not true that burning fossil fuels generates CO2, and/or some of it stays around in the atmosphere for at least quite awhile, and/or as long as its there it tends to trap more solar radiation than all else equal would have been the case, as specific but qualitative questions/answers outside the context of any particular quantitative prediction or proposed counter policy.
But politics is partly about reducing things to very simple statements that express an opinion. It’s the same going the other way. It’s common to hear people called ‘climate deniers’ who are just skeptical of policies they think will cost too much in standard of living (and a higher std of living also means greater adaptability to environmental change) and do too little to counter a problem too uncertainly defined relative to those proposed policies. The issue really isn’t a binary ‘do you believe science or not’. That kind of appeal is itself political rhetoric, misleading rhetoric IMO but not a ‘lie’ either.
The other thing again is belief in democracy. If you’re only going to outlaw the most provably false statements, you’re by the same token saying the body politic is incapable of discerning the obviously false. Again, do you on the next thread state your willingness to sacrifice all that ‘every vote be counted’? There’s some kind of contradiction there IMO. Or do you make a clown of yourself trying to claim only voters on the opposite side of the spectrum from yours are poorly informed or stupid? OTOH if the body politic only has trouble with more subtle falsehoods, it’s back to the reality that ‘subtle falsehood’ is typically a matter of opinion and/or framing of the issue or statement.