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Comment by Robotbeat | Hacker News Reader

Are people aware that impersonating a company’s customer is, like, fraud and opens them up to being sued for damages when something like this happens?

There are kind of two things that happened, here. One is a kind of rushed implementation of a questionable feature. The other is a breakdown of social taboo of just violating the law and/or acting in a damaging way.

We all know that spam and bots are rampant on the Internet. But people providing their valid credit card numbers to then impersonate another company for trolling purposes is something that could happen in lots of cases but held in check by people knowing they’d be sued or arrested/fined. Exactly like vandalism.

(And there’s maybe an ethical case to be made for direct action/civil disobedience, but legally that’s not a valid excuse so there’s definitely risk of being sued and/or arrested.)

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When you get enough people together, it's not enough to rely on the disincentive of individual prosecution to avoid bad actors. At scale, someone will think it's worth the risk or just not think at all and do something harmful.

This is why you can't open a bar without bouncers, or have an outdoor concert without on premise security. When you concentrate people together you simultaneously:

1. Increase the number of times you roll the dice with someone choosing to be harmful.

2. Increase the number of people within the blast radius (figurative or sometimes literal) of the bad actor who does.

You simply can't escape this fundamental law of human behavior. If you're building a system that aggregates people together—physically or virtually—you have an obligation to understand and deal with this.

Free speech protections in the U.S. make it extremely difficult for a company to pursue consequences for this sort of thing.

A previous employer was pranked via impersonation that was far more elaborate and convincing than one fake tweet. The corporate lawyers were able to get the fake website taken down, but any legal action beyond that was quickly dismissed.

There's also the "empty pocket" problem; it's not like Eli Lilly is going to actually get $billions in compensation from some random person on Twitter. The lawyer time to draft the complaint would probably cost more than the best possible award they could expect.

Honestly, that's more on Twitter than anyone who is doing the impersonating, whether parody or not. Their design and brand language put the "blue checkmark" front and center as a badge of legitimacy, giving it away for $8 to anyone is just asking for fraud.

Alternatively: this sort of thing will always happen because it has the potentially to be very funny

Not difficult to claim parody protection

Its just a prank bro - or I am a "Journalist"

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