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Comment by Buttons840 | Hacker News Reader

Well, I know my political opinion is that you should check out my new product, and I'm going to express this political opinion a lot. If necessary I'll include a sentence about a US President.

I'm half serious here. I would love to tell people about a new game I have on Steam (let's say), so I code a WebDriver "tool". It searches out gaming related Tweets and then expresses my political opinion. I have to press enter once for each post it makes. It's not a bot, since it only responds to user input from a genuine Texan. I even do a captcha by hand every once in a while.

I guess it goes back to your excellent quote, nobody know what compliance with this law looks like.

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The very fact that you made this comment implies that you expect the public to understand what it means. Therefore, so would a jury of your peers. In other words, if you get that this behavior is just a twist on botting, it's safe to assume the courts will too.

You expect way too much of the justice system... The 'peers' on HN are very different from the peers on an average jury

You expect way too much of HN. Apparently, the average poster on HN doesn't know how jury selection works. There's nothing "average" about a jury.

If I have to run a thin thread of politics through my product from beginning to end I will. It won't be the first time a product is tied to a political identity, and it's often beneficial to do so.

Heck, I'll even make two similar products and tie each to a different political party, so everyone can buy the product that matches their political view. My products are political statements, and 1% of all profits go to political causes!

I'm not faking, if you give me an incentive to let my political opinion seep into every aspect of my life, I can do it; even without incentive I find it hard to avoid. Being able to spam social media about my product without punishment is a pretty big incentive.

If I genuinely believe that the most important thing people can do to support <politician> is buy my product, that is still far - far! - from the most extreme political views out there.

Someone out there is pushing their product as a supposed political view, you drag them into court and find that they actually believe it, and they also genuinely believe the world is flat and the government is run by lizard people. What are you going to do? All their speech about those things is now protected.

Sure, all of that's true, so long as you can convince a judge, or a jury of peers selected by a team of attorneys highly paid to make your life a nightmare.

The law is subjective, just like your spiteful view of it. And you can bet there are spiteful judges, just like you.

A lot of your comments seem to be in the realm of "it doesn't matter what the law is, judges and juries will do what they want", which I partly agree with, but within the context of this debate we should assume that judges and juries will uphold the law. Otherwise, why are we debating the pros and cons of the law if nobody is going to uphold it?

Because reality is that laws are not enforced regularly, equally, and uniformly.

But it's out of context. If you and I are arguing the pros and cons of 2 possible laws, and I counter your arguments with "juries will do whatever they want", and you counter my arguments with "juries will do whatever they want", we both have this free counter-argument that we can use without any thought at any time. That's not an argument anyone can win, so why are we here? Although, fair enough, maybe we should both take a step back and stop arguing because it really doesn't matter?

It's not about what juries want. Do you get a royal flush on every hand of poker? Why would you expect that in any given court room in America you'd land a case where the judge is stupid, and the prosecutor is stupid, and juror number one is stupid, and etc. It's unlikely. If you're really the smartest guy in the room, you're not going to be arguing semantics in there. And if you try, you'll quickly become the most unlikeable guy in the room. Which is a lot worse for you.

I read it more as ”you obviously understand the spirit of the law, and so will judges and jury members, even if the letter of it can be twisted if you argue in bad faith”. Not that the law would be intentionally ignored in favor of anyone’s personal agenda. A lot of people seem to love to try to poke hole in laws through nitpicking and technicalities in the written word, whereas in reality rulings are made by humans who are still allowed a modicum of common sense and discretion.

NB, I haven’t read the law and I wouldn’t be qualified to comment anyway, this is my interpretation of the comment you responded to.

What is 'botting'? Would it include paying a bunch of college kids $50 to spam reply this message to people for 3 hours a day?

That all depends on how many years your attorney has been playing golf with the judge.

> What is 'botting'?

It's whatever your acceptable-use policy defines "botting" to be, as long as that definition is viewpoint-neutral.

A restriction against "paying a bunch of college kids $50 to spam reply this message to people for 3 hours a day" is clearly a viewpoint-neutral one, and so, yes, it would be obviously legal.

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