Hacker News Reader

Comment by mandmandam | Hacker News Reader

If we're "being fair", having to label every thought you tweet with "PARODY" to not be banned is fucking bananas.

And it's nearly 180 degrees from what any reasonable person would call "free speech".

I'm staunchly in favour of freedom of speech and I do not have a problem with Twitter's current position on parody accounts.

I'm in favour of freedom of speech because I believe it is important that ideas must be shared and debated freely and that no one should be beyond criticism. Being allowed to impersonate others simply doesn't seem to be an important part of that.

See upthread the Onion amicus brief on parody and free speech https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33503929

Seems weak. Poorly written and based on plainly false assumptions. I agree with IV that no one should be prosecuted under law for impersonation as long as nothing actually fraudulent has occurred.

> Being allowed to impersonate others simply doesn't seem to be an important part of that.

You forgot the "allowed to impersonate others to do parodies" part of it. I don't understand how you can be staunchly in favour of freedom of speech while holding the position that this kind of speech, blatant parody humour using impersonation as a delivery tool, is not protected under freedom of speech.

If I somehow managed to register the domain "gooogle.com" and use it for humour, to take jabs at Google by displaying loads of fake ads instead of search results, showing on purpose unrelated results to the search query, etc., should my website be banned?

Impersonation for scams and straight up deception are already punishable under other laws, why is that impersonation for parody and humour should be punished? I thought that was... Speech.

You speak of "blatant parody humour using impersonantion". That seems a confused phrase. If an account is blatantly a parody, then it is not committing impersonation, because if someone knows that an account is a parody of a person, they also know it is not the person itself. If you want to make a blatant parody account, you may do so according to the current Twitter TOS. However, if you want to impersonate someone, you may not do that.

Your gooogle.com example doesn't seem to connect to the situation at hand, which is about whether it is against the principles of freedom of speech to place limits on impersonation even in such cases where no fraud is being committed.

My goal is that people should be allowed to express all views and criticise all people. If for whatever reason impersonation must be outlawed, so be it - it may in fact further the goals for which I support freedom of speech.

“I’m in favor of freedom of speech… but I’m fine with it being limited if I don’t care about it”

Amazing how quick they switch up

I think that people should be free to express any view and to criticise any person. That doesn't mean that I think people should be able to say whatever they want in whatever way they want. I think we should be able to stop people from harassing, impersonating, shouting excessively, etc. Those things seem in opposition of those goals the hope of reaching of which is the reason I support freedom of speech in the first place. No, it would be silly in my view to support both freedom of speech and unlimited speech in all ways in all circumstances.

Yeah but think about what could happen if you tweeted something you thought was obviously a joke and then everyone took it seriously? You might end up having to buy Twitter or something.

From what I understand, it's just meant for parody accounts.

To be fair, the people who labelled themselves as "Elon Musk" should have labelled themselves as "Elon Musk (parody)" or similar.

That way, they automatically label their tweets as parody, and don't have to include such sentences as "this tweet was a parody" as implied in your post.

In fact I'm pretty sure that's what is meant when the Twitter TOS states "To avoid confusing others about an account’s affiliation, parody, commentary, and fan accounts must distinguish themselves in BOTH their account name and bio."

Exercising their free speech by clumsily painting "pArOdY" in mspaint on their Twitter account banner picture, but not including "(Parody)" in their account name, is in breach of the TOS.

Having to put parody so visibly kinda defeats the purpose of this type of comedy. There was a guy in my hometown who made an account the seemed to be a local police department. It was hilarious. If you somehow didn’t catch that the police would never say these things, you could go to the profile and see that it’s a parody. What’s the issue with that?

"Comedy is now legal on Twitter"

~ Elon Musk, 2022-10-28

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1586104694421659648

Sounds like he forgot to label this one as a parody, eh?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com