Few milestones in life mean as much to the American Dream as owning a home. And millennials have encountered the kind of trouble totally befitting their generation, which largely graduated into the teeth of the disastrous post-2008 job market. Just as they entered peak homebuying and household formation age, housing affordability is at 40-year lows, and mortgage rates are near 40-year highs.
The anxiety this generation feels about the prospect of never owning their own home affects their entire perception of their finances and the economy, says Moody’s chief economist Mark Zandi.
“If they feel like they’re locked out of owning a home it colors their perceptions about everything else going on in their financial lives,” Zandi says.
Millennials have long been dogged by a brutal housing market. They faced not one, but two, cataclysmic economic events—the Great Financial Crisis in 2008 and the pandemic in 2020. Both of which left them reeling financially and struggling to afford a home. The Great Recession decimated the real estate market as the economy nearly collapsed under the weight of tenuous mortgage backed securities. While the pandemic brought with it a remote work boom that caused millions of citydwellers to flee to the suburbs, sending housing prices soaring.
Fraud doesn’t necessarily cover socialed7a as you aren’t selling a product or directly profiting off a service you are selling, so it’s a gray area.
You can have multiple layers of abstraction between the disinformation and actual income stream with social media influencers, which heavily muddies the water.
But at this time, AFAIK no… it’s not illegal in the US to cosplay in medical outfit and say random shit on Instagram.
They are defined, and we are talking about disinformation, not misinformation.
Disinformation is the purposeful spreading of factually incorrect info willfully and knowing it’s wrong.
Misinformation is the same but not knowing it’s wrong, basically “on accident” or because you genuinely think it’s the truth.
For disinformation to be legally acted on it would be up to the prosecutor to prove without a shadow of doubt that the defendant knew the info was wrong and benefited from still spreading it.
Which you can guess is very difficult to price, you’d need effectively to convince a jury that the person didn’t truly think they were right.
There are already precedents for this, as there is a type of disinformation that is illegal right now, and that is Libel.
The Depp v. Heard case was a well published example of this. The prosecters had to effectively prove that Heard truly knew she was lying and benefited from that lie, and acted to deceive. An extremely high bar to prove.
But they had evidence photos of her clearly doctoring photos, testimony of witnesses that went against her accounts, text messages, etc.
So it’s a high bar but not an impossible bar.
The same would be the bar for making “professional disinformation” illegal. You’d need to prove the person knew they were lying, which is very tough but not impossible (you’d be surprised how often these idiots just admit to it outright)