[mathperson]

welcome to America. This is why newspapers have legal departments. Personally, I'd rather have to worry about #fakenews and PR and spin rather than have to live in a where journalists fear prosecution from the rich and powerful for errors in their stories...like in the UK. The grey area is an intentional part of american jurisprudence, designed to protect the press and hopefully safeguard democracy. By making a wide grey area we put the burden of proof on the plaintiff.

Also...I am looking very askance at your characterization of 'could' as a weasel word. There are a lot of shades of grey in the world and we need degrees of certainty like could to help communicate that doubt. I think there is a large gap between troubling uses of the word 'could' and the example you gave me...which seems honestly quite innocuous.

What is your point with this comment? To suggest that people can use words to communicate doubt without having a factual basis for those claims and protect themselves from legal retaliation party by an injured party?

To support this conjecture you give me an example which is CLEARLY true. Loot boxes are 100% like gambling. You give money to receive a probabilistic reward with addictive properties. Designers intentionally seek out whales who will drop money on buying many boxes chasing the irregular high.

It seems eminently reasonably that this could make them illegal in places where gambling is closely regulated...using could here seems 100% necessary to communicate that legal experts probably disagree about whether or not loot boxes and their ilk fall under these older statutes.