Oh, that was the question? It wasn’t formulated that way in the post above, so I didn’t catch that.
I find implausible that they are directly breaking fraud laws. They are in doing things in ways where they won’t get sued.
When they are doing specific things considered fraud (like getting a veterinarian to approve the living conditions of their animals when it clearly shouldn’t), and there is proof (usually from an insider investigation by animal activists), they get sued.
I though it would be useful to point out that the sentence you used, “I think it shows a broad lack of reasonable planning, research and analysis by many activists”, is the fastest way to get disliked and written off as someone annoying you shouldn’t talk to. If you want to speedrun to an abrupt end to the conversation, fine, but I don’t think it is your goal.
For someone so focused on the value of being non-confrontational and of harmony, I find that odd.
Sharing your perspective is fine, but I’m sure you are well aware that there are ways to convey such information in a much better way.
For instance, using questions to rephrase that, or being more specific (“maybe XXX could benefit from doing XXX, what do you think of that”). But your statement is so broad here that it’s really easy to read as "you didn’t do research or reasonable planning ".
To be precise, what I didn’t like isn’t that you made a judgement on me or other people. If it’s justified, I like feedback. I also got the intended usefulness of what you ried to convey. I actually think that there are many activists that do not do a lot of research, it’s pretty common.
What I didn’t like is that you made such a judgement when the rest of the conversation made it pretty clear that you don’t know very well what animal activists are doing. Especially when the ones in EA spend a lot of time on research !
So I’d refrain from such statements in the future - I suggest this might benefit you.