Isn't there a litany of examples where the government has the power to decide and enforce truthfulness? Stuff like health claims and protected designation of origin.
> health claims, protected designation of origin, and public schooling
None of these are like the allegations of election tampering the article discusses, which is squarely in the realm of First Amendment-protected speech in America.
Yes. While there’s arguments to be made against those laws, it seems to be relatively harmless to allow the government to be the arbiter of truth in a few limited situations where the truth is fairly easy to ascertain.
(What’s that you say? The truth of claims about the medical efficacy of drugs are actually hard to ascertain? That’s true, but you’ll note that the standard of truth required by law is easy to ascertain — the question is not whether your drug cures cancer but whether you’ve gone through a specific FDA-approved process to test whether it does, and passed.)
The only institution in a democratic society in general that acts to determine truth is the court system. While a countless number of bureaucrats may make routine judgements about the truth, any disputes over that tend to head to a court.
In court trials, the smallest details of truth are liable to be deliberated and argued over extensively, often producing outcomes that satisfy no interested parties.
It’s easy to have an opinion about what is an “outright lie”, it’s more or less impossible to prove it, and it is literally Orwellian to establish an authority to preside over it.
