Punishment should be proportional to the crime. When you do graffiti on the side of a Burger King, it's a few hundred dollars and two man-days to clean it off. In proportion, the fine should be 2-3x that cost, and maybe 2-3 days in county jail for the offenders.
With the economy of internet scale, that ramps up fairly quickly. How many people saw that vandalism? With your local McDonalds, it's probably a few hundred, a thousand on the outside. How many people follow @BurgerKing? It's probably more on the order of millions. Even using a logarithmic scale, there's an arguement to be made for months in prison. The cost of the offsetting advertising campaign? Who knows; They say "There's no such thing as bad publicity", but certainly some money is going to be spent cleaning up this mess; Probably again 2-3 orders of magnitude more than the cleanup of the local franchise.
> "How many people follow @BurgerKing? It's probably more on the order of millions."
It's more like 85k, as the screenshot in the OP shows [1].
> "Punishment should be proportional to the crime."
I guess that depends on what the 'crime' here actually is (not saying it was acceptable, just that we should be specific on what the wrongdoing was before getting into sentencing - so to speak).
Edit: And isn't security a more important question than punishment? How did this account get hacked? I'd much rather the focus be on creating more secure systems.
Should highly visible graffiti (say, on a freeway overpass) deserve harsher punishment than graffiti down a poorly lit rarely trodden ally or in an unlit subway tunnel?
Are you enhancing this visibility economics to other "ideas" as well? e.g. that the punishment for the killing some public figure should be higher than the one for some homeless guy?
That probably has less to do with his importance in general than it has to do with him being a special government employee. For example killing a cop would also land you a longer term than killing someone else.
You probably wouldn't (or shouldn't) get a longer term for killing a homeless man vs killing Bill Gates for example.
The problem with applying that logic to internet-related crimes is that it's impossible to measure the number of people affected.
Your hypothetical '2-3 orders of magnitude' is spurious reasoning as well, the effect this unfortunate event had on the brand is also impossible to measure.
I'm not denying that the punishment should be proportional to the crime but by what proportion should we calculate against? The total number of followers that @burkerking has? That number multiplied by the number of fraudulent tweets?
Nobody should go to jail for 'tarnishing' some marketing material.
Following your logic, I could make an argument that this deserves less punishment since there is infinitely less physical damage. Most store owners that experience graffiti suffer the most from the fact that it is time consuming and expensive to clean up and/or repair. It is however trivial to delete these tweets.
EDIT: Additionally, seeing graffiti on a store may give me as a customer worry of going in for safety reasons, so their business could actually be hurt (aside from the costs of cleanup described earlier). The reality with this case is that I doubt anyone will draw conclusions about whether they will go to BK or not due to this prank, so the idea that just multiplying by eyeballs is a good metric is suspect.
It shouldn't be about how many people saw it. It should be about restitution; how much did the vandalism cost Burger King? Very little, perhaps even nothing when accounting for the publicity.
Punish the perpetrator financially as a deterrence. But prison time does little to make Burger King whole.
Idle thought: If this could be shown to be the case, i.e. that BK actually increased their profits as a result of the defendant's actions, could the court order the defendant to pay negative damages?
(I know the answer's no, I just find the idea interesting)
With the economy of internet scale, that ramps up fairly quickly. How many people saw that vandalism? With your local McDonalds, it's probably a few hundred, a thousand on the outside. How many people follow @BurgerKing? It's probably more on the order of millions. Even using a logarithmic scale, there's an arguement to be made for months in prison. The cost of the offsetting advertising campaign? Who knows; They say "There's no such thing as bad publicity", but certainly some money is going to be spent cleaning up this mess; Probably again 2-3 orders of magnitude more than the cleanup of the local franchise.