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State Senator Wants A Law Forcing Bots To Admit They're Not Human (brisbanetimes.com.au)
An anonymous reader writes:
Several commentators are calling for a law that requires bots to admit they are not human. There is a bill in California that would do just that. A new paper argues that these laws may look Constitutional but actually raise First Amendment issues.
The New York Times reports: Bots are easy to make and widely employed, and social media companies are under no legal obligation to get rid of them. A law that discourages their use could help, but experts aren't sure how the one [state senator Robert] Hertzberg is trying to push through, in California, might work. For starters, would bots be forced to identify themselves in every Facebook post? In their Instagram bios? In their Twitter handles? The measure, SB-1001, a version of which has already left the senate floor and is working its way through the state's Assembly, also doesn't mandate that tech companies enforce the regulation. And it's unclear how a bill that is specific only to California would apply to a global internet...
All parties agree that the bill illustrates the difficulty that lawmakers have in crafting legislation that effectively addresses the problems constituents confront online. As the pace of technological development has raced ahead of government, the laws that exist on the books -- not to mention some lawmakers' understandings of technology -- have remained comparatively stagnant.
The Times seems to question whether the law should be targeted at the creators of bots instead of the platforms that host them, pointing out that tech companies like Twitter "have the power to change dynamics on their platforms directly and at the scale that those problems require."
The New York Times reports: Bots are easy to make and widely employed, and social media companies are under no legal obligation to get rid of them. A law that discourages their use could help, but experts aren't sure how the one [state senator Robert] Hertzberg is trying to push through, in California, might work. For starters, would bots be forced to identify themselves in every Facebook post? In their Instagram bios? In their Twitter handles? The measure, SB-1001, a version of which has already left the senate floor and is working its way through the state's Assembly, also doesn't mandate that tech companies enforce the regulation. And it's unclear how a bill that is specific only to California would apply to a global internet...
All parties agree that the bill illustrates the difficulty that lawmakers have in crafting legislation that effectively addresses the problems constituents confront online. As the pace of technological development has raced ahead of government, the laws that exist on the books -- not to mention some lawmakers' understandings of technology -- have remained comparatively stagnant.
The Times seems to question whether the law should be targeted at the creators of bots instead of the platforms that host them, pointing out that tech companies like Twitter "have the power to change dynamics on their platforms directly and at the scale that those problems require."
The statute should require saying "beep boop I am a robot".
The discrimination starts
Table-ized A.I.
Note the line in the OP:
The measure, SB-1001 [...] also doesn't mandate that tech companies enforce the regulation.
This is a ridiculous proposal, along the lines of DMCA requests where there is no penalty for filing a false claim.
Rather than have senators note a problem and legislate the first thing that pops into their head, how about we get one or two of the big players on board, get several proposed solutions, identify a method to measure success, and try each of those solutions?
Specifically on the subject of bots, note that CAPTCHAS have evolved over the years with several rounds of implementation. The original implementation ("enter the letters shown") can now be cracked by programs at the human level - so much so that making it more difficult than the algorithms can handle makes it more difficult than *humans* can handle.
The proposed law will only lead to more false-positive banning of real humans, which can be a) tuned to a political ideology, and b) for the human to give up privacy to regain their account. ("Send us a copy of your ID and we'll reinstate your account", or "Send us your phone number and we'll make you more secure.")
California needs to stop making laws on a whim, and start making laws based on study and evaluation of results.
Who needs bots send the captcha to a 3rd party to solve
[($)]
Don't you guys get tired of government trying to be your mom? Do you really need your government mom to protect you from the nasty bots?
Be a grownup and make grownup choices. Then you won't need a government mommy watching out for you.
No amendment (not even the first amendment) is without limitations. As far as abridging your freedom of speech, this ranks as high as not being allowed to broadcast a false Caller ID number. Will people be affected? Yes. Are they the people that the general public want stopped? Also yes.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
...any artificially generated post, story, anything else to be preceded by, "This content was artificially generated"
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
I'd like a law that requires all calls made for the purpose of influencing votes be made from numbers that have been registered for them so that I can automatically block them. No further changes in phone laws should be made before addressing that most annoying barrage of calls prior to every election.
In general, instead of laws to regulate how the calls are accomplished, I want laws with real penalties and a mostly automated enforcement system that allow me to block calls by type of content. Whether it is an AI or a person, I do not ever want to receive calls talking about wonderful credit offers. In general, I do not want to receive any marketing call, ever, including from companies that I already do business with.
Also, I get calls all of the time that are illegal under the current laws. For the last year, they have almost always come from spoofed numbers of real people within my local exchange. Because they use a different number for every call, they cannot be blocked. Until this is addressed, no phone law is of any consequence.
I want the telcos to be required to implement system changes to allow them to block illegal call makers and then made responsible for effectively employing those systems. It should not be possible for a device to spoof whatever numbers it wants to spoof without being registered and monitored to make sure it is doing so for a legitimate purpose and limited to the minimum set of numbers required to implement that purpose. If we're concerned about telco abuse, then make the penalties for abuse be loss of license and thus business.
In no case though should we support blocking calls by the type of caller or race of caller or require callers to identify their type or race. Specific identities, fine. But laws specifically focused on maintaining someone's idea of what is a pure human race, forget it. We've been there.
Let's focus on the content and purpose of the calls - not who makes them.
It's like the "law" that says undercover cops have to tell you the truth if you ask them if they're a cop. I read about it online.
You are welcome on my lawn.
"whore wife" I'm ashamed of what my side has become when I regularly read posts like that from my liberal friends on Facebook and Twitter.
I can see how this would work with phone calls, but how is this supposed to work on the global internet? It's has no teeth when the bot servers aren't located in the US, and possibly creates asymmetrical issues when companies are located in the US but serving foreign markets. I just fail to see how it's practical. A better approach might be education because the average American confuses bots with troll farms, or macro/algorithm enhanced human accounts, or simply other people online. Simply educating people what bots can and can't do, and how they typically operate with today's tech, and what to look for might be more effective. Then again that's education, so your mileage may vary on that front.
It's all these sorts of little frictions imposed by clowns like Hertzberg who think "There ought to be a law!" to solve every little problem which cause people to not be able to start a small business, or try to survive as an artist, or whatever freedom they want to exercise this week, but can't because the regulatory burden for stupid stuff is just piled on and on in places like CA.
Oh, puh-lease. Enough with the "evil regulations are keeping small businesses down" bullshit. That ol' Fox News trope is just that: old. The fact is that the US has, realtively speaking, very few regulations that prevent people from running businesses. I'm in retail, and we're subject to close to no regulations. We have to pay taxes, and we can't discriminate against people. That's about it.
This is a piece of legislation that is trying to combat the very real problem of people who aren't smart enough to see through disinformation, being disinformed. I would say that doing something to prevent this, again, very real, very serious problem, far outweighs some kind of scammy "social media marketing" business that you're suggesting must rely on bots.
Somebody selling some fake nutritional supplements via MLM won't be able to run a Twitter bot from CA. Oh no! I'm clutching my pearls at the prospect!
I don't respond to AC's.
2B or not 2B
In other words, true ?
Ezekiel 23:20
he's just trying to get a rise out of you. I'm your side (about as lefty as it gets) and don't waste time going after Trump's family unless they're part of the problem. Melania most definitely isn't. Hell, the word is she was crying when they won the presidency and it wasn't tears of joy. She didn't want any part of the current mess.
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