Even outside the securities law context, there are laws against false advertising and against fraud. Such laws are permissible under the First Amendment becaus

Even outside the securities law context, there are laws against false advertising and against fraud. Such laws are permissible under the First Amendment because false statements of fact are mostly excluded from First Amendment protection [1]; in addition, marketing is considered “commercial speech”, which is given slightly less protection overall than “political, ideological, or artistic speech” [2]. In practice, what that means is that the FTC goes around suing companies for false or misleading advertising. Who knows if they’ll care about this issue: they only have so many resources, and/or they may not see this as crossing the line. Of note, though, the FTC does have an active lawsuit against AT&T regarding an unrelated issue: namely, “unlimited” plans being throttled after reaching a certain level of bandwidth usage. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_statements_of_fact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_statements_of_fact [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_speech https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_speech