this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2024
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I'm sure they could find some way to have the terms of service agreement include a paragraph on how a handle is the property of Meta and not a user identity.
Business accounts can be exempted from injected advertising.
Post the ad as an image attachment and put the advertising disclaimer within the image? There's a lot of ways they can make an ad disguised as a post, and not all of them are as easy to filter out as a quick text search.
If @OutdoorsyOdin posts content about hiking and mountain climbing, you can make a reasonable guess that the subscribers are going to be interested in that kind of activity. It's not targeted to a specific user, but it's good enough to serve ads targeted at specific lifestyles or hobbies.
Exactly.
Anyways, this whole thing is to show that they could try to enshittify their fediverse integration if they really wanted to. There's no technological barrier preventing them from sending ads through ActivityPub.
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.