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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.
This is going to hurt the Anonymous Coward industry. There are always economic consequences for these kind of liberal laws.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
Put the bots in cyber jail? Force them to do other cyber community service?
"If you can't tell the difference, does it matter?"
I mean, other than the ability of a bot to call 1E6 people simultaneously.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
If they can stop spam robocalls, how the hell are they going to stop bots?
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.
What about bots that make bots that pretend to be people?
In debates about Christianity, there are two groups: those looking for answers, and those looking to just ask questions.
..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?
What if I program a bot that learns to interact on twitter (like many experiments have been seen here on /. before), and that this bot learns through interaction with other users that it's better for itself to hide its artificial nature? Who's responsible? I did not program the bot to lie, it learned by itself to pretend to be a human.
Video of some good progressive thrash music
Of course, that would stop some 1980's nostalgia dance craze recreations....
You are a cunt that thinks people you disagree with is guilty even if proven innocent. Fuck off and die, and I hope it is slow. Painful.
Perhaps, like King Canute, Brown is just trying to demonstrate his humility by doing this ...
Make it so!
Humans ARE robots. They are just made of meat and not metal.
you say YES!
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
As a bot identifying as a person, I find this anti-bot discrimination and bigotry to be unacceptable.
You can pry my bots out of my cold dead hands. When you outlaw bots, only outlaws bot.
I think a ban could extend to a lot of people, pretending to be real people.
Oh, the humanity.
... not actors.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Can Slashdot do something about pastebin bots?
Go to the creimer YouTube channel.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
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.
This is a dark day. If bots act like people and respect the equal rights of others, they deserve the same rights as people.
We should't be practicing discrimination based on silicon vs. carbon substrate. Bots have rights!
This will go down, like Dred Scott, as an outrageous and immoral classification of bots as second-class citizens.
(I for one welcome our new AI bot overlords.)
"Shoot, a fella could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff."
Someone will create a system that queues up posts for "review" by real people who will sit and whack the "send" button as quickly as possible. They'll hire the people who used to do captcha farming, who went out of business when Google went to the image-free "I am not a robot" system.
Nope, no sig
... only outlaws will have bots.
Most of the bots are already violating the terms of service, and possibly committing fraud as well.
If you tried sacrificing chickens and that had no effect, would you expect sacrificing more chickens to somehow work?
Why expect "law" to be any different from "sacrifice chicken"?
can we get SJWs classified as bots.
What if the bot identifies as human? Huh?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Jerry Brown himself fails the Turing Test.
Is anyone else sick and tired of the illegal robocalls that spoof names and numbers of individual humans? They easily make up more than 90% of my incoming calls now, and the spoofed numbers change so frequently that I'm worried I'll hit the wall and not be able to block any more numbers. None of the government entities responsible for shielding us from such fraud are doing anything to stop it.
Those things were all already illegal under US law before this, and in other countries too. Your lame attempt at astroturfing has been nullified.
We'll always find a way. BTW, how about a law preventing humans from pretending to be machines?
Organization? You must be joking..
What "us" are you talking about? California is the main driver for global American economic influence. The rest of the US barely makes an impact beyond minuscule quantities of agricultural goods. Even the best American wine is Californian! Your views seem biased and your communications intentionally designed to incite conflict in people who have more of a vested interest in your narrow branch of politics. Honestly you do seem brainwashed by the paid Russian troll brigades, the dreck from Glavset. Hopefully they paid you for your soul.
Do they even make handcuffs for bots?
Beware of Sales Reps bearing gifts.
Given that California is governed by certifiable lunatics should anybody expect anything different from this sort of thing?
{o.o}
Not that I have an expectation for the outcome, but I anticipate that there will be a first amendment challenge. Just playing devil's advocate, if anonymous online statements are covered through free speech, why wouldn't bot messages?
Just another day in Paradise
Two problems:
1.) cre 1 mer
2.) 5440320
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.