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California Governor Jerry Brown Signs a Bill That Bans Bots From Pretending To be Real People (nbcnews.com)
California governor Jerry Brown signed a bill last week that bans automated accounts, more commonly known as bots, from pretending to be real people in pursuit of selling products or influencing elections. From a report: Automated accounts can still interact with Californians, according to the law, but they will need to disclose that they are bots. The law comes as concerns about social media manipulation remain elevated. With just more than a month to go before the 2018 U.S. midterm elections, social media companies have pledged to crack down on foreign interference.
A big part of that effort has been targeting bots that spread misinformation and divisive political rhetoric. Twitter said it took down 9.9 million "potentially spammy or automated accounts per week" in May and has placed warnings on suspicious accounts. Dorsey has even publicly floated the idea that Twitter may try to identify bots and label them as such. Bots are also not limited to social media. Google caught the attention of the tech industry in May when it rolled out Google Duplex, a new voice assistant that could talk over the phone with humans to schedule appointments or make restaurant reservations -- complete with "ums," "ahs" and pauses just like a human.
A big part of that effort has been targeting bots that spread misinformation and divisive political rhetoric. Twitter said it took down 9.9 million "potentially spammy or automated accounts per week" in May and has placed warnings on suspicious accounts. Dorsey has even publicly floated the idea that Twitter may try to identify bots and label them as such. Bots are also not limited to social media. Google caught the attention of the tech industry in May when it rolled out Google Duplex, a new voice assistant that could talk over the phone with humans to schedule appointments or make restaurant reservations -- complete with "ums," "ahs" and pauses just like a human.
It's completely unenforceable. Even if the State could locate and identify the boots, they can't do anything about it if they aren't in California.
Unless this law allowed them to target the service provider that hosts the bots, like Twitter, nothing will improve.
If they can stop spam robocalls, how the hell are they going to stop bots?
Next will be a Bill banning people from being mean on line.
I expect it will be just as easily enforced as this Bill.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
It really does.
People are social animals, out point of views are influenced on what people think (And now I will get a bunch of posts saying how they are not a sheep, and have their own view unrelated to others viewpoints). Bots give the allusion of a popular idea, without it actually being a popular one.
Thus influencing people opinion to the majority without the normal process of initial debate.
If I had a point I wanted to make and get a good following behind it, I could write a bot, to spread it. Chances are enough people would be fooled by it, thinking that my stupid idea had enough merit to get such a following, then agree to it.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
How do we educate the masses so they do this automatically?
I'm not sure if it's possible. The human mind is full of little cognitive pitfalls and there's often very little real consequence for most people for getting tripped up in one of them. If someone believes some bogus news article that already reinforces their existing (yet wholly incorrect) beliefs, what are the odds that those beliefs actually cause that person harm in a way that they can directly attribute to their mistaken beliefs? There's no good feedback that motivates better behavior. Worse is that it's comforting to people to have their beliefs reinforced, which makes it even more difficult to expend the additional effort needed to do research.
Even if you can get a person to go that far, there may be little reward outside of the act itself. No one is motivated to learn and share the truth if it just means that every other idiot around them who's more comfortable believing the lie will immediately dog pile the person who has done the research and found a better answer. And that's not just over trivial matters either. This has been true of science as well, where everyone expects the people to be better than the masses. Humans are tribal and we enjoy being part of the pack and even if we're neutral about something, might just join in with the crowd instead of trying to learn the truth. It costs less and increases social cohesion for the individuals to behave that way.
I think that the only realistic chance is for us to genetically modify ourselves and remove those traits. It's a dangerous bit of fire to play with for sure, but I'm not sure there's another way around it. Everyone says that they want people to be good critical thinkers, right up until those critical thinkers question whatever sacred cow the others might have. Then suddenly there isn't so much of a push for it. No person or group of people is likely to have the correct beliefs about everything, so there's always something that they'll try to suppress.
It's completely unenforceable. Even if the State could locate and identify the boots, they can't do anything about it if they aren't in California.
No but a certain prominent company headquartered in California just demonstrated such technoloy and they certainly could be held accountable. Frankly just about any company that matters has a presence in Silicon Valley and that gives the State of California leverage. It's similar to how the State of New York has outsized leverage in financial regulation because of the fact that NYC also happens to be a major financial center where all the major players do business.
(Now go play in traffic - which I'm quite sure is illegal in California... so how dangerous can it be??)