That last part is just the slippery slope fallacy though. There are many cases where you are not allowed to lie, and knowingly helping someone lie is also a criminal offence.

Was Trump's water sport in Moscow story fake news? It has been widely used by CNN. As far as I know it as never been proven. Political debates are riddled with half truth, exaggerations, and carefully selected statistics. It is a slippery slope. It's not as binary as a computer program where it is either correct or not correct.

The fallacy is about doing nothing because one action might eventually lead to a bad action being taken. The solution is to still take the action (e.g. not working together), while being careful not to immediately go on a witch hunt for any deemed wrong.

The response from Microsoft management is good I think. They mention it's just about email, calendar, etc. There's nothing special in providing that. The Google case was quite different.

The US constitution is built on the idea that if a power is given it will be abused, and it is this fundamental distrust of any power given and the builtin counterpowers that have made its success over the long run.

It is not a fallacy, it should be the first thing anyone should consider when establishing a new authority.

We have an entire huge system of justice and courts built for just that purpose. You are simply ignoring that this is not a new or unique problem but a pervasive and generally solved issue. Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom, but not using the tools at the disposal of our democratic society, when people abuse this freedom to lie and cheat to undermine rational discourse is just dying another death. With how entrenched outright lies are in the US right now (c.f. FOX airing people claiming that the crying children at the border are child actors) it will be a long fight back. And every step of that fight back to rationality will be accompanied by people like you standing aside going "well, their just voicing their opinion. And what's a lie anyway.". Now if this was just the US affecting the US that would be one thing, but with the US remaining the largest military superpower and the largest emitter of greenhouse gases unfortunately it's dysfunctional political discourse is being projected deep into the rest of the world...

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Incidentally when looking up exact quotes for another reply in this thread I found this WaPo article:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/01/10...

"Dutch journalists peppered Hoekstra with questions on unsubstantiated claims he made in 2015 about chaos that the “Islamic movement” had allegedly brought to the Netherlands.

“There are cars being burned. There are politicians that are being burned,” he said then, at a conference hosted by a conservative group. “And yes, there are no-go zones in the Netherlands.”

The comments have widely been described as inaccurate, [...]"

Right. 'Inaccurate', not even the WaPo is calling a lie a lie.

Not been proven vs lying is a difference. For example, Trump saying Germany has increased crime due to immigration and is fixing its crime statistics, or his ambassador to the Netherlands saying in the Netherlands politicians are being burned are lies.

Advertisement is also riddled with half truth, exaggerations, and carefully selected statistics. Yet false advertisement is still illegal. And in my opinion advertisement should be much more strongly restricted still.

As it is you've just reiterated the (IMO) fallacious slippery slope argument, and not addressed my point that it's a fallacy.

Just because there is a grey area doesn't mean we need to freeze in paralysis. I say because of the grey area we should be careful with where we draw the line, but the existence of grey does not make it impossible or prohibitively dangerous to draw one. Otherwise we would have no laws.

I don't know. "Does it violate the UN Convention on Human Rights?" is a good start. Also "Does it violate the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child?". Or, y'know, the Kantian Imperative.

I think that’s actually a good standard. How are determinations made for what violates the UN Convention on Human Rights?

I'm struggling to understand what you mean here.

You believe being entitled to a life free from false imprisonment, torture and persecution is left-wing rubbish?

Is this satire?

The only people who are against the concept of basic human rights are those priviliged enough to never have been threatened in such a way.

That can change very easily.

Well, I guess somehow these ideas are still divisive in the year 2018:

"No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms."

"No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment."

"Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law."

"All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination [..] and against any incitement to such discrimination."

"No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile."

And so on and so forth.

Full text: http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/

I don't think that's an accurate analogy. An accurate analogy would be forcing someone to officiate a gay wedding.

To take an extreme example, I actually don't think someone selling cake to concentration camp guards is guilty of anything - but someone selling fenceposts, guns, gas and census software(cough IBM) is complicit.

I'd argue selling a wedding cake is actually more involved than selling cloud compute time or office software if that is what is at stake in Microsoft's case, and which is really generic by nature.

I have more reserves on the concentration camp analogy. I don't think the shoah should be pulled in every debate.