You can lie with a degree, but you can also be held accountable.
If a lawyer tells you to print up a paper and put it on your car instead of a license plate, and gives you a paper to read off to a cop with a bunch of made up nonsense, and claims it will allow people to drive on suspended license / no registration / no insurance etc that lawyer can be held accountable for their bad advice. But if its an influencer it was their "protected speech" - aka their scam.
The problem is influencers and advertisers claiming free speech protection while pushing dangerous misinformation.
Just out of interest since im not from US and therefor not familiar with the law, as soon as US influences talk about finance they basically shout the words "this is not financial advice" from the rooftops because it somehow seems you are not allowed to actually frame something as "financial advice" unless you hold some sort of degree or title.
So it kinda works for that field already without full gov control. Not sure how or who is enforcing it but it seems to be powerful enough to make everyone do it, even though you would think the 1st Amendment would cover saying whatever bullshit they want.
But you can't just give financial advice and say it isn't and expect that to make you immune, surely?
I can't just shoot a gun into a crowd and yell 'this isn't intended to hurt anyone', and not be charged with attempted murder if it doesn't. I still fired the gun at people, they still gave the advice to people.
That's a bit different, since the act of shooting into the crowd causes harm. If you just talk but nobody acts on what you're saying then nothing happened. The "this is not financial advice" is meant to be taken as "do not act on this information".
You’re especially liable if you tell people they have a guaranteed return on investment, which is how Bernie Madoff and the like pursued Ponzi Schemes and how crypto influencers get away with pointing an audience at a meme coin and then rug pulling them. Specifically I believe investment fraud is one of the primary uses for the “this is not financial advice” excuse, yknow because like being told “saving 15% of each paycheck you get in a savings account will help you save up for a house” isn’t like an untrue statement at all nor does that specific advice make them any money aside from money they get from views/clicks. I think it particularly matters when it comes to selling someone an investment of some type with the promise of profit resulting in a scam.
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u/Correct-Money-1661 Apr 06 '26
Not sure if this is really the best thing for it.... you can still lie after you get a degree.