Fake News Ask Me (Just About) Anything — With a REAL Lawyer
UnderAcademy College Special guest Digressor
in How to Write and Read Fake News: Jounullism in the Age of Trump
Fake News can have serious consequences, and let’s face it, we don’t want your Twittering and Facebooking to get you locked up in the hoosegow next to the guy who wrote that story about Batboy’s divorce. We don’t care if you get sued, but we’d rather you not wind up writing real prison memoirs (they’re a bitch to Tweet!)
So, in order to protect your hides, and instead of protecting your ethics, we’ve decided to bring in an actual lawyer. * Meet Andrew Bouvier-Brown, esquire, who has agreed to chat with us, donating a few quartiles to answer your questions or have a very capable para-paralegal answer them.
(*lengthy disclaimer)**
(**Okay, not THAT lengthy): Andy will be dispensing information here, not advice. This isn’t a confidential forum, and plus… well, you haven’t paid him, sucka. He’s not forming an attorney-client relationship with you. Got a real legal problem? Call a lawyer and talk in real life, in private. C’mon, don’t WebMD your legal issues, people!
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Andy:
When a problem as intractable as fake news starts to impact very real life, there is often an impulse to try to solve the problem by criminalizing behavior. Episodes like ‘Pizzagate’ may suggest that it is only a matter of time before real-world violence occurs and ‘fake news’ is explicitly identified as the motivation. If that happens, efforts to criminally punish the fake-news generators might very well follow.
I’m a practicing criminal defense attorney at the trial level, and I ponder and worry about criminalization of speech and the value of the First Amendment. I don’t know much about civil litigation — okay, I don’t know anything — but I’m happy to talk about criminal law and the First Amendment, or anything else criminal law related which comes to mind. Ask me (almost) anything!
