What about people in chatrooms giving advice to the traders that pay them a monthly fee? Is that similar? These guys all have disclaimers and same for all the twitter folks
That case wasn't decided as you think it was decided. In reality, it made the SEC's job much harder, by ruling that Lowe's speech had some constitutional protections. The Supremes overturned the Appellate Court's decision. You need to read Justice Stevens's majority opinion:
After a discussion of the distinction between "personal" and "commercial" speech, he concluded:
I emphasize the narrowness of the constitutional basis on which I would decide this case. I see no infirmity in defining the term "investment adviser" to include a publisher like petitioner, and I would by no means foreclose the application of, for example, the Act's antifraud or reporting provisions to investment advisers (registered or unregistered) who offer their advice through publications. Nor do I intend to suggest that it is unconstitutional to invoke the Act's provisions for injunctive relief and criminal penalties against unregistered persons who, for compensation, offer personal investment advice to individual clients. I would hold only that the Act may not constitutionally be applied to prevent persons who are unregistered (including persons whose registration has been denied or revoked) from offering impersonal investment advice through publications such as the newsletters published by petitioner.
Although this constitutional holding, unlike the Court's statutory holding, would not foreclose the SEC from treating petitioner as an "investment adviser" for some purposes, it would require reversal of the judgment of the Court of Appeals. I therefore concur in the result.
Essentially, he says (I think) that while the SEC is free to go after Lowe or anyone else for actual violations of their antifraud regulations or other rules, they can't simply litigate them for giving bad advice to people who aren't actually their clients. Earlier, before presenting his conclusion, Stevens noted:
Surely it cannot be said, for example, that, if Congress were to declare editorial writers fiduciaries for their readers and establish a licensing scheme under which "unqualified" writers were forbidden to publish, this Court would be powerless to hold that the legislation violated the First Amendment. It is for us, then, to find some principle by which to answer the question whether the Investment Advisers Act, as applied to petitioner, operates as a regulation of speech or of professional conduct.
In the end, it came down to a question of freedom of speech.
Of course, what most promoters today claim in their own defense is that they're merely "advertisers" who have no responsibility for the content of what they publish.
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