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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.
I can not be the only one seeing that California is the leading part of the USA now, that the only goods USA news is all about California. This matches the reality of technological development, economic development, and actual industrial development. California has the best shipping ports for heavy cargo, and its companies are quickly becoming the only reliable remote sensing information provider. Hopefully the next element will be to label "Made in California" for the export market, so that it isn't dinged when the world embargoes general US products.
..however: it's not enforceable, assuming the 'bot in question is realistic enough to pass muster with the average person, and the 'bot owner doesn't give a damn about the law (which a foreign operative working within the U.S. most certainly woudn't) or if it's owned by someone outside the borders of the U.S. The real solution to this problem is people need to stop believing shit they read online that's coming from 'people' they don't personally know, or at the very least they need to learn to apply some critical thinking and some basic research to verify something is factual or not. Sites like Snopes and Politifact are probably good places to start. So then the problem becomes: How do we educate the masses so they do this automatically?
Humans ARE robots. They are just made of meat and not metal.
Like many laws, they become an extra charge that can be placed on the person who does get caught.
Why do you see people get put in jail while shown innocent for the crime they are arrested for, but on a numerous of other laws that they got charged against after the fact.
Also many of these tech companies are California based, So if these companies just let the bots happen, then they will be targets too.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Unlike the story yesterday about California requiring women to be on a board of directors, I think this law may actually be helpful. The point isn't to enforce it and then create some world where no bots are trying to deceive people. The point is to allow for legal penalties when someone is caught doing it, and it may have the side effect of additional truth in advertising.
I haven't read the text, but there might be some unintended gray areas with regard to various programs that do things like scrape web content. Is a web scraper trying to impersonate a person using a browser, or not?
Either way, if this had the effect of legit bots telling people they are bots when interacting with them, and providing legal penalties if they don't, it's not really a bad thing.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black