[zugi]

> The public might well question why so much time is spent on this, while burglaries routinely go unsolved.

I'd offer yet another explanation: laziness.

For burglaries, you have to get out of your chair, go out into the community, interview witnesses, search for evidence, and maybe wander into dangerous areas to find and arrest potentially violent suspects.

For internet thought crimes, you can sit in the comfort of your own chair, getting paid to surf the internet, and declare enough posts "offensive" to look productive. When you do show up to arrest someone, they're highly unlikely to be violent. It's a lot easier and safer than investigating burglaries.

[ndsipa_pomu]

The other side of that coin is that burglaries are limited in that the criminals have to physically be present to commit the crime and that puts a hard limit on the number of victims. Posting incitements to commit violence on the internet is not inherently limited and can easily provoke riots based on complete falsehoods. There's also the much more dangerous issue of destroying democracy by misleading a large number of voters.

[zugi]

Misleading voters is what democracy is all about!

But more seriously, society has dealt with misinformation and disinformation for millenia and collectively decided that freedom of speech and the press were key factors in keeping democracy, and were a more vital concern than the threat of misinformation. To me, government deciding what is or isn't misinformation is a step away from democracy and towards tyranny. But I do understand that reasonable people can disagree about where to draw the fine lines of freedom of speech.

[neanda]

this is very important context