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Comment by bostonvaulter2 | Hacker News Reader

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bostonvaulter2

I think threatening legal action over posting a link to the fake ads is overkill.

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The threatening tweets are part of the brand assassination, not actually from Shell.

This crosses a line for me. It's one thing to roast a company over a fire, it's another thing to impersonate them.

The whole thing is impersonating them!

There's obvious parody (which the original campaign kind of skirts at the edge of), and there's outright impersonation.

A reasonable person should be able to tell the roast from the real deal - the original website was at the very edge of it, the Twitter account is right off the cliff.

You're right, free speech is such a hassle. People who have the temerity to make fun of foreign oil corporations should definitely be imprisoned.

Free speech doesn't cover fraud, defamation, and libel - all of which are already illegal.

So basically what you're saying is, impersonating people is wrong, but it's ok when we don't like the person/group being impersonated.

Do you have principles, or is your morality purely based on convenience?

The second, of course.

Just like how its legal to shoot terrorists, but not Americans. All morality is based on drawing tribal lines, and BP isn't in my tribe.

It's legal to shoot American terrorists if they're in the act.

Oh, that wasn't very clear from the article.

"It also has tweeted repeatedly that the account is in fact a legitimate Shell account. But of course, it, too is a fake. Not that web users realise."

It's easy to overlook. The text of the tweet and the immediately following article text run together:

http://imgur.com/OHq5z

One of the downsides of disabling javascript is that you may not see websites as they intend you to see them.

I'm only using Ghostery, I wouldn't expect that to affect the main content of a site.

Ghostery's blocked list:

  DoubleClick
  Facebook Connect
  Google +1
  Google Adsense
  Google Analytics
  LinkedIn Widgets
  NetRatings SiteCensus
  ScoreCard Research Beacon
  Twitter Button
  Tynt Insight

... just disabled Ghostery, and one of those is affecting the article content.

My guess is that Ghostery considers the javascript that is served by Twitter to be a tracking device (quite possibly correctly)... but I could be wrong.

The article did a horrible job of in-lining those tweets.

Oh, I'm retweeting these quite knowingly.

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