Ask Slashdot: Is Deliberately Misleading People On the Internet Free Speech?

Slashdot reader dryriver writes: Before anyone cries "free speech must always be free," let me qualify the question. Under a myriad of different internet sites and blogs are these click-through adverts that promise quick "miracle cures" for everything from toenail fungus to hair loss to tinnitus to age-related skin wrinkles to cancer. A lot of the ads begin with copy that reads "This one weird trick cures....." Most of the "cures" on offer are complete and utter crap designed to lift a few dollars from the credit cards of hundreds of thousands of gullible internet users. The IQ boosting pills that supposedly give you "amazing mental focus after just 2 weeks" don't work at all. Neither do any of the anti-ageing or anti-wrinkle creams, regardless of which "miracle berry" extract they put in them this year. And if you try to cure your cancer with an Internet remedy rather than seeing a doctor, you may actually wind up dead.

So the question -- is peddling this stuff online really "free speech"? You are promising something grandiose in exchange for hard cash that you know doesn't deliver any benefits at all.
Long-time Slashdot reader apraetor counters, "But how do you determine what is 'true'?" And Slashdot reader ToTheStars argues "It's already established that making claims about medicine is subject to scrutiny by the FDA (or the relevant authority in your jurisdiction)." But are other things the equivalent of yelling "fire" in a crowded movie theatre? Leave your best thoughts in the comments. Is deliberately misleading people on the internet free speech?

Comments

truth in advertising

[Anonymous Coward]

Making it a free speech issue is taking it too far, it's always really just been about whether it's false advertising / fair trade / fraud / etc. We already have a lot of laws that govern what businesses can and cannot say to customers in their efforts to sell them things. None of them are free speech violations, they're consumer protection limits. Enforcement is the real problem.

Re:truth in advertising

[Anubis IV]

Exactly. This is an old problem that was, at least legally, largely solved decades and centuries ago. Slapping “on the Internet” on the description doesn’t change the fundamental issue or make it a new problem.

It’s like when we have to explain that a patent is lousy because all they did was slap “on a computer” onto an idea that’s been around for our entire lives. Fraud is fraud. False advertising is false advertising. Whether it’s on the Internet or not really shouldn’t make a lick of difference.

Re:truth in advertising

[mvdwege]

Actually, laws against false adevertising are a free speech violation. That's because those laws were made in the realisation that no right can be absolute, that in any society there will always be rights that clash, and that the right to make a buck does not extend to lying to impact someone else's health and property.

It is people who actually want their speech to be privileged, or immature teenagers, who think that free speech is absolute, without actually checking their facts. It has always been subject to prescribed limits, all society is is haggling over the price.

Re:Slashdot readers should sure hope so

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

then stop with the FUD that portrays those companies as actively working against the interests of society and most people.

All companies will actively work against the interests of society and most people if it is within their own interests to do so. Microsoft & the rest of the big tech companies do so everyday by actively evading paying their fair share of taxes.

Short view, Long view

[poity]

Freedom leads to mistakes in the short term; critical thought and independence in the long term.

Censorship leads to safety in the short term; naivete and dependence in the long term.

Money

[TubeSteak]

Once money is involved, it's no longer free speech, it becomes "commercial speech."

Commercial speech operates under a different set of rules, with significantly more restrictions.
"False or misleading" commercial speech is explicitly against the law.

There is some wiggle room for "puffery" (world's best hamburger.)
There is also some wiggle room as long as warnings or disclaimers are included.

Some warnings and disclaimers are what we'd call "compelled speech," because the government requires businesses to say them.
Compelled speech is pretty much the opposite of free speech.

Re:tradeoffs

[I75BJC]

Please read history. Political change has, many times, started with anonymous speech. For example, without anonymous speech there would have been no rebellion in the American Colonies of Great Britain. Because many of the political tracts were published without attribution, the Crown could not find all the authors and punish them. The shear number of anonymous authors and means of publication is one of the reasons that the Colonies were united in their rebellion against Britain and successful in their Revolution. Simply stated, No Anonymity; No USA.

Re:Slashdot readers should sure hope so

[TWX]

And there's a moderation system here, theoretically designed to judge the quality of speech without actually restricting it. Granted, as any forum can become something of an echo-chamber then perhaps it is not perfect, but usually poor-quality comments get moderated down and high-quality comments moderated up.

As to the FUD about Microsoft in particular, Microsoft's history since its inception has been fraught with nefariousness. MS-DOS was essentially a clone of CP/M, at least as far as the particulars of the user interface are concerned. At one point Microsoft used an OEM licensing model that essentially froze-out competing OSes because the OEM had to pay for Microsoft for all personal computers sold whether or not Microsoft's OSes were wanted by the end-customer. Microsoft over the years has attempted to freeze-out competition through writing their own function-alike software and then once it becomes popular, writing proprietary components into it and pushing for those proprietary components to be widely implemented such that competitors' software is unable to work.

If Microsoft software was high quality, bug-free, security-hole-free, then perhaps there wouldn't be so much anger at Microsoft's business practices, but Microsoft's software has historically been both bug-riddled and terribly insecure and open for exploitation. Entire industries have been built to attempt to make up for mediocre software. It's no surprise when a new target-for-compatiblity becomes concerned, as history has demonstrated that by introducing compatibility, Microsoft will break that compatibility when it feels the time is right to get customers to migrate to Microsoft off of whatever previous software they used, and the cycle repeats.