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Comment by nradov | Hacker News Reader

Please explain how such a law could ever possibly comply with the constitutional vagueness doctrine, and with 1st Amendment protections on freedom of expression.

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> explain how such a law could ever possibly comply with the constitutional vagueness doctrine, and with 1st Amendment protections on freedom of expression

Fraud is not protected by the First Amendment [1]. This is old law.

[1] https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF12180

Fraud isn't protected, so that is how you would handle the 1st amendment. Whether the person was acting as an actor or was endorsing it as a celebrity is a matter of fact for the jury. It actually doesn't even sound that hard to demonstrate. Tom Brady wasn't paid 10MM (or whatever) because he is that much of a better actor. He was paid to be himself and endorse a product.

But how do you define "celebrity" in a legal sense. Why is Jimmy Noname not culpable but Chris Pratt would be? And what if Jimmy Noname did an FTX ad and the following year got the lead role in the most successful movie of 2023? Is he retroactively a celebrity endorsement?

Mercedes' Formula 1 car had like 6 FTX ads on it this season. Why isn't Mercedes or Lewis Hamilton in this class action?

You wouldn't define celebrity. You would define endorsement. And you would let the lawyers present evidence and let a jury decide whether they thought the person was endorsing it.

I'm not sure it's a good idea, but it's an interesting idea. And the follow on effects of making endorsements things that people actually believe in would be a nice world.

I assume Mercedes/Lewis Hamilton weren't included because the lawyers went by whoever did it on the superbowl. Cause it was an easy list to find. And a lot of Americans don't know anything about F1 so it's under the radar.

None of the celebrity endorsers committed fraud. You didn't answer the question.

You mean, because they were merely negligently misleading instead of intentionally misleading? Yes, it's seems to not be under the current definition of fraud. I thought we were discussing a counterfactual that the OP suggested where negligent endorsements were actionable under a law similar to fraud.

Fraud was used by me as an example of the 1st amendment being okay with certain commercial speech being actionable.

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