To the Moon? Emojis can be financial advice, says judge | Hacker News Reader

To the Moon? Emojis can be financial advice, says judge

theregister.com

37 pointsrntn11 comments

Levine had a nice, and more detailed, write-up last week too (https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-02-23/slam-d...), including this bit:

--- NBA Top Shot’s Twitter account promoted not the coolness of the highlight videos, but the amounts of money involved in Top Shots trading. The opinion quotes some of them, and adds:

Each Tweet promotes a recent sale or statistics of recent sales of Moments on the Marketplace. And although the literal word “profit” is not included in any of the Tweets, the “rocket ship” emoji, “stock chart” emoji, and “money bags” emoji objectively mean one thing: a financial return on investment. ---

Which specifically highlights the bit about where and why the emojis in question are financial advice, and why it meets the Howey Test.

If you tell someone (through emojis or otherwise) that they'll make a profit buying something, that's financial advice.

> why the emojis in question are financial advice

I'm behind on Money Stuff, so I had to go check his column. Unlike the confused headline, he doesn't say anything about "financial advice" because it's irrelevant here. The Twitter account's emoji usage was relevant to establishing that it was marketing securities by promising a return on investment.

https://archive.ph/uvSjS

Makes sense... else people will just start communicating in emoji to absolve themselves of legal liability. If you were to send a question to your advisor, and they respond with a thumbs up, we all know what was being communicated.

I see this attempt to avoid scrutiny in a lot of modern communication. The common thread is the intentional blurring of the line between being unserious/irreverent and full-fledged joking. You can say something in an unserious/irreverent way and still mean it, while joking implies that you don't mean it, and people frequently try to hide in the space between when saying things that are objectionable, for various definitions of objectionable.

One common example of this is when person X back-handedly defends person Y by saying that they're "trolling". That implies that Y doesn't really mean what they're saying, but with a lot of wiggle room. Y might mean it, and X might know it.

I mean, sure. If "this stock is about to EXPLODE" is financial advice, so is "this stock is [rocket][rocket][money bag]". Whether you're using words or emoji to express yourself, the underlying sentiment is the same.

They need to register unicode for not-a-legal-advice emoji to prefix all twitter comms.

btw. why doesn't it work the other way around? If you explicitly state that this is legal advice, then it is one, otherwise it's not?

simply saying "this is not legal advice" does not magically grant you a get out of jail free card for a pattern of behavior that is otherwise subject to regulation.

likewise, claiming "this is not financial advice" before repeatedly promoting your financial instruments also does not provide legal immunity.

The NFT case isn’t clear cut to me. Yes, people bought NFTs expecting a return on investment. But people buy baseball cards for the same reason. I just went on whatnot and saw numerous channels selling cards using rocket ship emojis. Where do you draw the line?

Sure, but the point is that Topps isn't posting pictures of baseball cards with a rocketship and a link to buy cards.

The article is discussing how Dapper Labs who sells Moments (NFTs) was clearly promoting the NFTs as a way to make money by buying them now, selling them later for more, and that Drapper Labs was funding itself (at least partially) through the sale of those NFTs.

> Where do you draw the line?

As discussed in the article it's drawn at the Howey test. https://www.google.com/search?q=Howey+Test

Of which your comment didn't attempt to show baseball cards as violating.

The entire article you linked is dedicated to how hard it is to fit crypto into the existing regulatory framework. All of the questions about crypto in that article apply to NFTs, but even more so.

I don’t really buy the argument that the seller’s marketing of an NFT is what makes it a security. There has to be more to it than that.

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