this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2024
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Threads has no influence on the terms of service on Mastodon. So no, Threads can't allow to misrepresent profiles on Mastodon.
From my previous comment:
ActivityPub literally will not let them impersonate accounts from other instances. That much should be obvious. The topic is about them impersonating their own users and using that to push ads through federation.
No, that's not the topic. The topic is ads being placed in the fediverse in a way only defederation could block. Even if Meta silently making posts in the name of my favorite organic orange juice advertising Coca-Cola was legal (it's not), it would be easily solved by simply not following any Threads accounts. Also, Lemmy cannot interact with Threads anyway, so Lemmy servers defederating from Threads is completely pointless.
No, that's not legal. That would violate copyright, consumer protection, competition laws, and whatnot, at least in the USA and the EU. Mastodon users (!!) must be explicitly aware that a post is an ad, not the brands ticking off an EULA on Threads. Therefore Mastodon users could decide to follow a brand account were products are promoted (just as they can right now if that brand has a regular Mastodon page) but Threads cannot legally impersonate one account on Threads to advertise another account. That's not a grey area.
I didn't set a timer but it took me at most a single-digit number of minutes to find documents and announcements about the FTC tightening the rules about deceptive advertising several times throughout the years.
Let's go with your idea of what the topic is for a second: have you considered how advertisement posts could appear in search results, hashtags, or the explore section? Or what if they decide to screw with the normal process and artificially inflate the number of boosts and favorites for advertisement posts? Okay, the solution is to simply have your instance users refrain from following any Threads accounts so the posts don't show up anywhere—which is effectively defederation.
Irrelevant to what I'm saying.
Copyright to what? A person's name? A small string of characters that is a "handle"? None of that is copyrightable.
Doot Doot @SomePerson@example — 4h
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As I previously mentioned, corporate accounts can be excluded to remove running afoul of competition laws.
As with my example toot above, that took all of 15 words. They don't need to be deceptive about what is or isn't an advertisement to push that shit through the ActivityPub protocol.
Your whole argument is predicated on the idea that a (personal) account on Threads is either owned by its creator, or is associated with a trademark. Furthermore, there are a number of different approaches they could take to argue that the ActivityPub support provides access to a feed of content, and not an individual identity.
In any case, you're repeatedly glossing over the fact that my original point was to say there isn't a way to prevent it AT THE PROTOCOL LEVEL.
Considering that I've replied to another person with my explanation and got very positive feedback, I certainly know better than you. You're not the person I've replied to. You interjected and then tried to educate to me what my comments are about.
Any brand account on a regular Mastodon instance would be the very same.
Mastodon doesn't have an algorithmic timeline, so that would lead to absolutely nothing.
Relevant to the comment I've initially replied to.
Nope.
No, I made several good arguments, you just moved goalposts and declared they don't matter.