Why aren’t individuals and politicians liable for the claims they make in politics?
Rae Grulkowski, a 56-year-old businesswoman, swayed many of her neighbors in a political effort, but her claims were apparently wrong. https://tech.slashdot.org/story/21/10/25/0158204/how-misinformation---and-one-facebook-group---threatened-a-federal-investment-in-montana
You see this constantly, especially at the local level — somebody gets upset about something, drums up a movement and prints some sort of manifesto ranting about the problem or goes on media talking about it. But their facts are wrong.
Consider this in context. If a corporation were to do this when advertising their product to sway somebody to purchase something, they would run afoul of “Truth in advertising” laws.
Is it possible we could figure out some similar sort of “Truth in politics” laws where people could become culpable for the claims they make — even news agencies. If anything that culpability could simply be either a fine OR an equal effort put into correcting their false claims (so a news agency mistakenly putting a false claim on the front page one day would have to use the same amount of real-estate, when it was realized their mistake, with a correction).
My mother in law recently dealt with somebody in her area upset because the city council changed elections from “first past the post” to “ranked single transferrable vote” (note: Imho this is a great change). However this person, who had never dealt with any political office or voting before, drafted a letter and hand delivered it to hundreds of houses, in which they ranted about how it’s nothing more than election fraud and they instructed people to fight the problem. Many believed him.
But his claims of why it was fraud were flat out wrong, and were based in a complete mis-understanding of how this type of voting works (he claimed your vote could be reassigned to whomever the council wanted once one of the seats were filled). Yet now hundreds of people hate the new voting and want to go back to the older (more systemically bad and easily corrupt) voting system.
Perhaps this is already the case that individuals are liable for their incorrect claims (they are liable via truth in advertising), and it’s just not easy for it to be enforced because at a smaller level nobody cares. It’s also really hard where something is “opinion” and proving “truth” is difficult.
Unfortunately I don’t have any answers, I’m posing this as a question for discussion — perhaps others more versed in the laws of this domain can weigh in?
