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Comment by 1337shadow | Hacker News Reader

Usurpating identities is illegal, parodies are not. Where exactly is the debate here?

For the purposes of opening a bank account or for getting a loan then it would be considered identity theft. Pretending to be someone else online though? That's perfectly legal free speech in the US as far as I'm aware

So you'd be happy if people created social network profiles pretending to be you and posting whatever they want people to believe you said because of free speech? Sounds pretty weird, are you sure you don't have a law against such abuse?

I thought free speech was me saying what I want, not a free pass to mislead people to believe I said something I didn't.

I wouldn't be happy with it but that doesn't make it illegal. In some countries it might be considered libel/defamation depending on what was said, but those standards vary wildly between/within countries and are to my understanding generally not considered criminal

And permitting lying or misleading speech is a pretty core part of free speech, it might be socially frowned upon or disincentivised by terms of service/moderation/other methods, but it's certainly not illegal

Actually, the user was benefiting from the blue checkmark of "verified account" and changed name and photo to "Elon Musk", that's got to be clearly a violation of twitter verified account terms, don't you think?

It probably is against the ToS, but it's also perfectly legal first amendment speech, which undercuts Elon's claims that he's turning Twitter into a free speech platform. Seems more like a Elon-sanctioned speech platform

It used to be so much more free before yes https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspensio...

Anyway, break the ToS of a any service and you'll get suspended, I fail to see where the debate is right there.

The title of the article is misleading, the comedian account was not unlabeled: it was labeled as certified.

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