If the user clicked a “generate me a share link” button, and the button also, without letting the user know prior to the button press, enables search indexing, that is indeed a leak.

Competent Politicians are well aware that they're not experts on everything and hence hire domain experts to help them understand those domains and actually make informed decisions about them. Mind you, I suspect this specifically is more a side effect of the profound problems with Dishonesty and Cronyism that the UK has: basically they tackled drought as a negative perception of the Government problem, so set up a talk group to project the impression that the Government was doing something about it and chose as head of it (and to be well paid for it) somebody whose greatest qualification for it was being their mate, all of which is very typically in British power circles. The natural consequence of such things is them producing fancy press releases which look absolutelly moronic for domain experts, but since most of the people who read such releases are not domain experts, that's usually fine and in fact advances the true purpose of that "group" (managing perceptions). Even with the Tech Press internationally picking this up and making fun of it, since the very same people who play these power games over there also control the local Press, they might very well get away in Britain itself with a press release with even such a moronic idea as this, as it will be spinned to make them look good.

Fuck Israel, genocidal scum!

The problem cited by payment processor is dodged if the money is coming in as donations rather than payments, no?

The point is... (almost) nobody is going to do that. Ask a layman what a SMTP is.

The thing about compelling lies is not that they are new, just that they are easier to expand. The most common effect of compelling lies is their ability to get well-intentioned people to support malign causes and give their money to fraudsters. So, expect that to expand, kind of like it already has been. The big question for me is what the response will be. Will we make lying illegal? Will we become a world of ever more paranoid isolationists, returning to clans, families, households, as the largest social group you can trust? Will most people even have the intelligence to see what is happenning and respond? Or will most people be turned into info-puppets, controlled into behaviours by manipulation of their information diet to an unprecedented degree? I don't know.