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Comment by BulgarianIdiot | Hacker News Reader

You can argue what he's doing is basically fraud. Those accounts claim, if you click the check, that "they subscribed to Twitter Blue and provided a phone number". Which they didn't.

LeBron was contacted by Twitter if he wants a free complimentary check paid for by Elon Musk. LeBron's team said "NO". And his status was misrepresented, anyway.

The purpose of this misrepresentation is so LeBron's followers believe LeBron is supporting Elon Musk and encouraging people to subscribe as well. Which he didn't.

This is a serious breach of trust between a social network and its users. The network is basically lying so it can profit from its celebrities by FORCING them to endorse a service they explicitly don't want to endorse.

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I agree that this is fraud / false endorsement / whatever. If it's "only" three people, as Musk as claimed (LeBron, Shattner, King), it's probably manageable for Twitter to sort out, but I'm guessing a lot more people were quietly grandfathered in. This could get ugly. It's no different from me comping Elon on my shitty SaaS product and then claiming he's a "customer."

I'm not sure if it's _fraud_, but it's arguably libellous. One could argue that it's clearly defamatory to incorrectly claim that someone was stupid enough to pay $8 to naughty old Mr Car.

This resulting in litigation would make it even funnier. It’s only a serious matter in the world of the twitter brained.

So you think that's not serious. It's fine if social networks which have the power to sway elections, to build and destroy businesses, which have the data & represent the identity of hundreds of millions even billions of people... can just misrepresent your position & make you falsely endorse their products? You have no idea what you're talking about.

LeBron James alone has almost FIFTY THREE MILLION FOLLOWERS on his account. This is more than any newspaper, any TV channel's audience right now. Are mass media also a joke? Should laws no longer apply to them then?

Many of these FIFTY THREE MILLION FOLLOWERS will be swayed by the false endorsement to pay a $100+ dollar annual subscription to Musk. Based on this fraud.

But it doesn't matter that we're talking about potentially billions in revenue obtained illegally, never mind because Twitter is just for shits and giggles, nothing is serious on it. Let's just ignore it because if it has stupid memes on it, it can't possibly matter.

Jeez. The merits i guess are there for a lawsuit for false endorsement just like celebrities sue scammers that say they endorse scam products e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/06/business/media/sandra-bul...

Just it's funny and the lawsuit would be funny, and I don't really believe there's a meaningful number of people subscribing for twitter blue because these celebrities "did." Certainly not enough to react as you are and believe this is massive fraud.

Google “false endorsement”. It’s illegal. No matter how many “jeez” and “lolz” we add to it.

Didn't LinkedIn pull similar sort of shenagigans some years ago, telling people that a particular contact (e.g. because that contact uploaded their contact list with email addresses) wanted to connect, although that contact didn't actively do so?

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