Nintendo Alerted After Dhs Uses Pokémon to Promote Ice Raids

Posted3 months agoActive3 months ago

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22 comments

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NintendoIce RaidsCopyrightActivism

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Nintendo

Ice Raids

Activism

The Department of Homeland Security used Pokémon characters to promote ICE raids, prompting calls for Nintendo to take action, but commenters debated the effectiveness and implications of such a response.

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01Story posted
Sep 23, 2025 at 12:29 PM EDT
3 months ago
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02First comment
Sep 23, 2025 at 12:50 PM EDT
21m after posting
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03Peak activity
13 comments in 0-2h
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Sep 24, 2025 at 7:30 PM EDT
3 months ago
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Discussion (22 comments)

Showing 22 comments

busterarm

3 months ago

1 reply

Calls for Nintendo to step in and do what exactly? This would almost certainly meet copyright challenges on fair use grounds.

HeavyStorm

3 months ago

2 replies

This could be viewed as smearing, which would be abuse. It's relating Pokémon to a politically charged subject at a minimum. I would also argue that it's a violent video. Nintendo could ask for a takedown on those grounds.

pseudo0

3 months ago

It's political satire, it's 110% fair use. Nintendo can't bully the US government with an army of lawyers, so they aren't even going to try.

itsdrewmiller

3 months ago

Relating to politics is one of the most common uses of parody and one worth protecting even if this specific use isn’t one I agree with.

HeavyStorm

3 months ago

2 replies

Another controversial post marked as "dead". HN must take a look about this systematic effort to erase out this kind of post from here.

asacrowflies

3 months ago

2 replies

It's kinda insane how political this place is under the false guise of "neutrality". A real right wing echo chamber

HeavyStorm

3 months ago

2 replies

Wouldn't go _that_ far, but surely there are people working to get rid of this kind of post, which is certainly a problem. And it should be easy to find out what accounts are abusing the "dead" flag and punish those.

docdeek

3 months ago

HN guidelines state that if it is a story that will be found easily on a mainstream news site, it is probably not a good submission for HN. I flag political posts fairly regularly because there are plenty of other places to have those conversations besides HN.

itsdrewmiller

3 months ago

Why do you think it is a problem that some HN users flag posts they don’t think belong on HN?

kulahan

3 months ago

1 reply

HN is literally the only actually-balanced community I've seen on the internet.

asacrowflies

3 months ago

1 reply

"balanced" as in the the constant ratchet effect of moving the reasonable overtone window more and more to the right under the false guise of "neutrality and civility"

This forum has a high proportion of unscientific nonsense that would have been viciously mocked by "hackers" at this forums founding. (Climate change and covid denial. Basic security fails from big corpos. Plaintext passwords etc)

This place is "balanced" the same way 4chan is . One of the last places these people feel secure in their insanity .

kulahan

3 months ago

Nope, balanced as in people are allowed to have a balanced viewpoint of things. And don't worry - even back in the founding days, there were still flat earthers and climate deniers and vaccine skeptics. These people are still downvoted to hell here.

I don't know if it ever came back up, but you should go spend a little time on /b/ - you seem to have forgotten how bad that site is.

nebula8804

3 months ago

We need some mechanism to display all the flagged posts, maybe a flag to show flagged posts? Of if HN is unable to update the codebase, maybe a scraper to show the flagged posts in an easy to use format. Right now I am stuck having to google for political topics (using site: filter) and looking for the posts that are buried.

ronsor

3 months ago

3 replies

The cards are clearly parody (fair use), assuming they would even infringe copyright at all. I'm not sure what Nintendo is supposed to do, but I assume if they do anything at all, it would result in more tariffs (bad for their revenue) anyway.

CharlesW

3 months ago

1 reply

It's brand-damaging for the government to, for example, represent sexual predators of underage people (speaking here of accusations against Nery Garcia Linares, not the U.S. President) represented as Pokémon, especially with children as Pokémon's primary audience. Nintendo has successfully won several cases in similar scenarios by invoking brand tarnishment.

itsdrewmiller

3 months ago

1 reply

Can you link to the most similar of those cases? I would assume that most parody would risk tarnishing a brand.

zparky

3 months ago

I couldn't find any case of this, from this wikipedia category[1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Nintendo_litigation

DengistKhan

3 months ago

I haven't watched the video, but if it's "funny video featuring Pokémon" and not "Direct parody of Pokémon", then fair use/parody might be a losing defense. I assume in this case it's not a direct parody of Pokémon, but instead a promotional video or propaganda video that features Pokémon with humorous intent.

dfxm12

3 months ago

You're right, but Nintendo has a reputation for taking legal action against "clearly" fair use, including fan made stuff posted on social media.

This combined with WB having Trump's Dark Knight video pulled is probably why people bring it up...

incone123

3 months ago

1 reply

When I was growing up, it was extremely common for left wing artists to rework and subvert corporate art. It is sad to see activists now so limited in their imagination that their strategy is to run to tell the corporate lawyers. If you wish for more corporate control of intellectual property, well I'm sure the Republicans and the Democrats will both be happy to oblige.

rimunroe

3 months ago

> When I was growing up, it was extremely common for left wing artists to rework and subvert corporate art.

For as long as there has been corporate art there have been artists and activists subverting it. Before corporate art, the same thing happened with religious art.

> It is sad to see activists now so limited in their imagination that their strategy is to run to tell the corporate lawyers.

This isn't a case of people tattling to Nintendo because some random person drew a comic they didn't like. This is people wielding what little power they have against the State.

> If you wish for more corporate control of intellectual property, well I'm sure the Republicans and the Democrats will both be happy to oblige.

I don't see how this cedes more power to corporations either. This doesn't involve or require Nintendo to flex some power they haven't used many, many times before.

crtasm

3 months ago

I hope the people who took a children's game and put images of abusive and violent adults onto it will one day feel some shame for their decision.

Think of the children?

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ID: 45349294Type: storyLast synced: 11/20/2025, 2:27:16 PM

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