It's great to see people getting nailed for biased posts -- but I suspect that people posting misinformation for emotionally satisfying reasons actually cause more harm.
If the AG is serious about prosecuting harmful behavior, rather than evil capitalists, he ought to go after anyone who would rather forward an email than fact-check, or who argues for a viewpoint because of feel-good emotions ("All decent, NPR-listening, upper-middle-class white folks like me know this is right") rather than facts.
This is about stopping a form of business-funded deceptive advertising. This is not about regulating private behavior or private speech. You can say (or forward) whatever you want as an individual. The issue here is dishonest commercial speech...
I really, really hope you don't actually believe that. You seem to be arguing that a claim made for reasons you don't like is morally inferior to a more harmful claim made for reasons you do like.
Is it really worse for one commercially-minded person to say "Try Acme Widget; I hear they give great service!" than for a well-meaning person to say "No decent person can afford to give these potential Satanic Ritual Abusers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelle_Remembers) the benefit of the doubt."?
It's fine to say that someone should not make harmful claims due to commercial motivations. But I don't see why the motivation is the concern, not the harm of the claim. Would you rather live in a world in which harmful claims aren't made, or a world in which harmful claims are made all the time, but at least the way people are compensated for them isn't monetary.
It's very easy to demonstrate that someone posting fake advertising is being knowingly deceptive, and being deceptive in this fashion is what's against the law. It's harder to demonstrate that the other kinds of speech you mentioned are the consequence of malice rather than ignorance.
If the AG is serious about prosecuting harmful behavior, rather than evil capitalists, he ought to go after anyone who would rather forward an email than fact-check, or who argues for a viewpoint because of feel-good emotions ("All decent, NPR-listening, upper-middle-class white folks like me know this is right") rather than facts.