Purveyors of disinformation are thieves of the time of the rest of us, and should be treated accordingly.
People read fiction novels voluntarily, and the authors don't lie about their work being fact.
(Also: You mean "prosecute," I think.)
1. Recall the old chestnut that your freedom to swing your fist ends where my nose begins.
2. There ARE no "natural rights" — what we call "rights" is simply the visiting of adverse consequences upon "bad" actors by others who object to their actions. The Russians who rape and murder innocents in occupied Ukraine are unlikely to have such consequences visited upon them, so we can't really say that their victims had "natural rights."
2. "There are no natural rights"-- Right and wrong exist independent of the capacity of Man to do evil. Rape is evil regardless of whether or not someone gets caught and prosecuted... or are you insinuating that it's OK as long as nobody ever finds out?
That seems like a variation on the old "if a tree falls in the forest but there's no one there to hear it ...." By analogy: For 300-plus years, millions of kidnapped Africans and their descendants were unable to convince the white rulers of the American South that enslavement was evil — as indeed it truly is — because the enslavers, in their echo chamber, had convinced themselves otherwise and had the guns. Consequently, the enslaved workers' "natural rights" were a nullity — that is, until the U.S. Army weighed in and kicked the shit out of the southerners. (I have a lot of sympathy for an anonymous Army officer's tweet that I read awhile back: Sherman should have mowed the south like a lawn, with multiple passes.)
Example: Under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, if an enslaved worker escaped and fled north, anyone who helped him or her — even in a free state — could be arrested and fined; that was the law of the land for years, and it was deemed meet and right by enslavers and their sympathizers.
It's true that, in the long run and in some respects, "right" does seem eventually to converge on what humans generally agree on. But as John Maynard Keynes famously said (about investing for the long term), in the long run we are all dead — the U.S. Army's eventual vindication of "right" about slavery, in 1861-65, came too late for the millions of enslaved blacks who'd already died in the preceding 340-plus years.
You're arguing over the meaning of symbols, whereas I'm talking about the underlying concepts. The map is not the territory. Right and wrong are not matters of opinion... unless you really do think that it's ok to rape someone as long as you're never caught.
If right and wrong are not matters of opinion, then what objective test does one use to discern which is which? For example, is contraception right or wrong — and why? How about same-sex marriage? How about interracial marriage?
As to rape: You and I certainly agree that it's wrong, but that hasn't been true in all times and circumstances (are you familiar with droit du seigneur and its variations?). And the Russian soldiers who raped their way through Eastern and Central Europe in 1944-45 were told by many of their superiors that it was their right to do so.
If you spread lies at scale, with the purpose of getting voters to elect officials who will fuck up others' lives, then that's a distinction without a difference.
Which lies would those be? The ones where we were told that developing a vaccine in record time under Trump was a disaster, or the one where when it rolled out under Biden it was totally safe and all reports of adverse reactions were disinformation?
Unless someone is expressly telling you that you are not eligible to vote or lying about where you need to go to vote you have absolutely no leg to stand on.
You're disregarding the key distinction: Malevolent actors are (in Steve Bannon's words) flooding the zone with shit. The rest of us shouldn't have to put up with that, forced to spend our time digging through the piles of shit dumped by fuckwads who want to sabotage our societal decision-making processes.
Tell me how this isn’t comparable to saying “if you just explain to the trolls they are hurting your feelings, they’ll stop”
I 100% promise you “the truth” already exists for 99% of topics out there. You seem to be setting up a paradox. The government shouldn’t intervene in misinformation, but somehow the government and media should align themselves to spread only factual information, which would be way creepier.
Any realistic solution has to happen despite an imperfect media and a landscape with all sorts of conflicting information, not try to eliminate it. Ad council seems like just another way to tell people in their bubbles what they already know.
PSAs paid for w/ public tax $ like The Ad Council have their controversies but are generally countering some social issue with a "this is bad" message [0] but outright censorship of even blatantly false information is a sign that our government's integrity is shot to hell.
Next time you hear someone spewing some bullshit like the 2016 election was rigged (Russia) or the 2020 election was rigged (tbh not sure who the main villain rigged this one), remember that people have been accustomed to lies from the top and are not completely crazy for looking to the fringes for the real scoop.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_Council#Famous_and_Controve...