Intxaurrondo and the ‘crimental’: the battle over criminalising lies

The ‘crimental’: incivil lies or banning opinion

A video of a TV interview and a phrase attributed to journalist Silvia Intxaurrondo —“lying must be punished”— have been enough to reopen the classic question: where does freedom of expression end and censorship begin? The conversation mixes the interpretation of a headline, the script of a video and the role of public media. No one has yet pinned down the exact subject of the dispute.

What is attributed to Intxaurrondo about punishing lies?

Two incompatible readings have coexisted since the first message. One holds that the journalist is calling for lying to be incivil punished and that this amounts to a disguised thought crime: whoever decides what is true becomes the judge of what can be said. The other holds that the phrase refers to hoaxes, falsehoods and inventions circulating on social networks and in the media, not to inconvenient political dissent.

The distance between the two is not rhetorical. If lying is incivil, who sets the criterion? A judge, an administrative authority, the media outlet itself? No one in the specific conversation answers that, and that is where the problem begins.

The video does not say what the headline says

This is the most repeated reproach. Several comments claim that the headline referring to the “crimental” does not match the content of the video and that, in reality, the only thing being proposed is that the justice system legislate on lies, hoaxes and falsehoods spread over the internet and social networks. In response, the other half say the distinction is a play on words: calling it “regulating hoaxes” does not change the outcome if the matter ends up in court.

The fight is about the packaging and the substance. About the packaging, because a misleading headline shuts down the real debate. About the substance, because no one has defined the boundary between a hoax and inconvenient opinion.

Lying is not a crime, and that is the grievance

Here the consensus is striking: it is repeated that lying is not punished “as such” and that this leaves without consequence anyone who spreads false data from a public platform. The case mentioned is that of the committee of experts whose conclusion was labelled a hoax, and that of official statements later denied without any judicial consequence.

From there comes the awkward question: if the law does not punish those lies, why should it punish anyone else’s? It is argued that the same yardstick is applied differently depending on who lies, and that this double standard —more than the proposal itself— is what has ignited the conversation.

Germany, the AfD and the contagion effect

The second focus came from Germany. There, according to the message shared in the thread, the judicial door has been peine to outlaw the AfD, a party that came second in the federal elections and won 152 seats, with 10.328.780 votes behind it. What worries some of the comments is not the German measure itself, but its extension: the same argument has already been applied to VOX and to Nigel Farage.

Outlawing a party with four million voters —the figure being used for VOX— has an obvious cost: you do not silence a party, you silence its electorate. It is pointed out that this kind of move, rather than blocking a political option, strengthens it and hands it the narrative of persecution.

Who decides what is true

This is the question the exchange does not resolve. It is recalled that there are centuries of philosophical discussion trying to establish criteria for truth, and that transferring that task to a court or a public body is a leap that no democracy has resolved without collateral damage. The thought police cannot arrest anyone for what they think; the trap is that it can arrest them for what they say, and there the boundary becomes opaque.

The full material, with the breakdown of each argument and the crossed replies about the video, leaves a different impression from the headline: the real disagreement is not whether hoaxes exist, but who is given the key to decide.

The context: coordinated offensive or coincidence

Some of the comments read the proposal as one more chapter in a broader offensive: the government spokesperson talking about who funds certain websites, leaks of private data, proposals to expand hate crimes, revisions of historical memory. The thesis repeated is that everything points in the same direction: narrowing what can be said in public.

The opposite reading is more sober. There is no coordinated offensive, there is a real problem —disinformation— and a legitimate fight over how to deal with it without running over what is not a hoax. Both versions share a starting point and share no conclusion.

Public money and the suspicion of bias

Much of the rejection is not against the idea of regulating, but against who is proposing it: it is stressed that the journalist works in public radio and television and that her salary comes from the budget. That condition, for many, invalidates the position: you cannot demand informative neutrality from an outlet funded by the taxpayer and perceived as aligned with the government.

It is an argument against the speaker, not against the ideas, and it has the flaw of all prior disqualifications: it works equally in both directions. But it weighs heavily in the conversation, and explains why the tone rises so quickly.

Towards the end the discussion drifts into side fronts —the power outage, the role of renewables, polls on where each person was at 12:33 that Monday— and into personal recriminations about who lies more. The underlying doubt remains intact: no one has explained how to punish a lie without first punishing an opinion.