Wouldn't necessarily call it a lie. More like implicature or maybe "Gricean expectation engineering".

A bit ironic, your comment could be viewed as using a similar technique. Given the ongoing controversy around water consumption in datacenters, choosing this particular example implicitly associates people raising concerns about datacenter water use with deceptive rhetorical practices, without actually making that argument explicitly or presenting a concrete context in which the supposed rhetorical device was used.

Of course, that's not necessarily your intention, only a point about implicatures.