Slashdot Mirror
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.
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?
Make it so!
Humans ARE robots. They are just made of meat and not metal.
As a bot identifying as a person, I find this anti-bot discrimination and bigotry to be unacceptable.
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.
I think a ban could extend to a lot of people, pretending to be real people.
Oh, the humanity.
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.