If our salespeople or CEO say "here, sign up and invite three friends to get our service" and then say "Haha psych! You can't actually get our service, sucker", then yes, I will tell them they're assholes.

Unfortunately I haven't had that chance, as the people I work with already know to not be assholes.

Are you telling me your sales person does not say "XYZ feature works" when it does not quite work as it was spec'ed? Please. Let's live in a real world.

Do you understand the difference between "tweet to access" and then purposely banning access and having a buggy feature? He told them they could use the service when they couldn't. The service wasn't buggy, he actively banned them, told them he would unban them if they did X, and then kept them banned.

If you still think that's okay, there's a fundamental disagreement here we'll never reconcile.

It is exactly the same as selling a product with a known broken or non-existent feature. But hey, it is HN - selective ethics is an art form.