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Do Social Media Bots Have a Right To Free Speech? (thebulletin.org)
One study found that 66% of tweets with links were posted by "suspected bots" -- with an even higher percentage for certain kinds of content. Now a new California law will require bots to disclose that they are bots.
But does that violate the bots' freedom of speech, asks Laurent Sacharoff, a law professor at the University of Arkansas. "Even though bots are abstract entities, we might think of them as having free speech rights to the extent that they are promoting or promulgating useful information for the rest of us," Sacharoff says. "That's one theory of why a bot would have a First Amendment free speech right, almost independent of its creators." Alternatively, the bots could just be viewed as direct extensions of their human creators. In either case -- whether because of an independent right to free speech or because of a human creator's right -- Sacharoff says, "you can get to one or another nature of bots having some kind of free speech right."
In previous Bulletin coverage, the author of the new California law dismisses the idea that the law violates free speech rights. State Sen. Robert Hertzberg says anonymous marketing and electioneering bots are committing fraud. "My point is, you can say whatever the heck you want," Hertzberg says. "I don't want to control one bit of the content of what's being said. Zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero. All I want is for the person who has to hear the content to know it comes from a computer. To me, that's a fraud element versus a free speech element."
Sacharoff believes that the issue of bots and their potential First Amendment rights may one day have its day in court. Campaigns, he says, will find that bots are helpful and that their "usefulness derives from the fact that they don't have to disclose that they're bots. If some account is retweeting something, if they have to say, 'I'm a bot' every time, then it's less effective. So sure I can see some campaign seeking a declaratory judgment that the law is invalid," he says. "Ditto, I guess, [for] selling stuff on the commercial side."
But does that violate the bots' freedom of speech, asks Laurent Sacharoff, a law professor at the University of Arkansas. "Even though bots are abstract entities, we might think of them as having free speech rights to the extent that they are promoting or promulgating useful information for the rest of us," Sacharoff says. "That's one theory of why a bot would have a First Amendment free speech right, almost independent of its creators." Alternatively, the bots could just be viewed as direct extensions of their human creators. In either case -- whether because of an independent right to free speech or because of a human creator's right -- Sacharoff says, "you can get to one or another nature of bots having some kind of free speech right."
In previous Bulletin coverage, the author of the new California law dismisses the idea that the law violates free speech rights. State Sen. Robert Hertzberg says anonymous marketing and electioneering bots are committing fraud. "My point is, you can say whatever the heck you want," Hertzberg says. "I don't want to control one bit of the content of what's being said. Zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero. All I want is for the person who has to hear the content to know it comes from a computer. To me, that's a fraud element versus a free speech element."
Sacharoff believes that the issue of bots and their potential First Amendment rights may one day have its day in court. Campaigns, he says, will find that bots are helpful and that their "usefulness derives from the fact that they don't have to disclose that they're bots. If some account is retweeting something, if they have to say, 'I'm a bot' every time, then it's less effective. So sure I can see some campaign seeking a declaratory judgment that the law is invalid," he says. "Ditto, I guess, [for] selling stuff on the commercial side."
Nice try. No, bots do not have free speech rights. The piece of pizza crust that I left in the box that's sitting on my kitchen counter also doesn't have free speech rights.
Now, are there any other stupid questions?
You are welcome on my lawn.
the person who has to hear the content to know it comes from a computer
There is an issue of extent here.
Pretty much everything that is written online has some element of "coming from a computer". Whether that is spell-checking (and auto-correct) or looking up facts and references online to insert into the content. It is arguable that the only truly human generated content is when the author has written everything, personally.
Even then, that relies on what they learned: at school, in front of a computer screen, watching TV or from the media. What is the "from a computer" content of all that?
And asking for anything to be signed "written by Blogbot v1.0" or some such is naive in the extreme. Doesn't this guy understand: people (and computers) can tell lies.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
... United.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Everyone assumes that "Russian hackers" are a) Russian and b) non-state adversaries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Never play leapfrog with a unicorn.
... or a dog.
(Thank you, Peter Seiner.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Betteridge just called to say, "fuck no, bots don't have free speech rights".
You are welcome on my lawn.
if the bot is owned by the account it's posting to, it still doesn't have any rights at all, especially first or 2nd amendment rights. /s?
If a bot is posting to social media to create furor, misinformation, or to pump and dump stocks, it should probably be immediately sentenced to death.
If a bot can pass a Turing test, and successfully file for citizenship, without human (or legal) assistance, then maybe, just maybe on a case-by-case basis, we could think about it. (or start building cyber walls to keep out foreign bots trying to steal our bots jobs)
we might think of them as having free speech rights
Or we could just use some common sense.
I have free speech rights. I can hold up a sign with message I want to convey. The sign does not have free speech rights, and it's legitimacy ends the moment it leaves my hand.
We might think of them as mushrooms as well.
I just did.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
You may wish to influence your children to choose a different university if they are planning on pursuing a Law degree.
Personally I would think that a bot's "speech" is really just an extension of the rights to free speech of the human creator of the bot. With the human right to free speech (at least in countries that have that right), there is also the responsibility and liability for what is said. The classic example is that of yelling "Fire!" in a theater. You are free to do this, but if you do, and there is not really a fire, you can be held responsible for injuries incurred by people trying to escape the non-existent fire. If you create a bot (program / algorithm that autonomously communicates on your behalf) and that bot makes untrue speech, I would think that you should be on the hook for slander or libel.
Quit being obtuse.
Try being a little deeper:
Do Social Media Bots Have a Right To Free Speech?
Does a printing press have a right to Freedom of the Press?
Does a USER of a printing press have a right to Freedom of the Press?
Does a USER of a social media bot have a right to Free Speech?
IMHO That sort of argument stands a good chance of prevailing at the Supreme Court. Anonymous speech has already been ruled to be protected, even (especially) if in the form of political campaign literature, and the anonymity protected even if the speaker/poster loses a suit due to the speech itself being tortuous.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
What if only bots that could not pass a Turing Test had to be labeled? This could be implemented with something (more captcha than Voight-Kompff) before allowing a submitted tweet/comment/etc to post.
i don't know karate, but i know ca-razy
It's even easier to trick real people into spreading bullshit, with a bot you can at least attempt to add some type of validation logic to it.
They don't have a soul. They are - you're not going to believe this - bots. Designed and run to shout and speak random stuff into a massive social space to achieve a desired effect of some sort. Sort of like yelling "Fire"in a building where there is none.
So no, bots aren't protected by free speech, just like my screwdriver isn't protected by free speech. Of course not.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I hate to say it but if a bot is representing a person, they could be seen as having First Amendment rights by virtue of representing and enabling an individual's anonymous speech as long as that speech is one of the permitted classes under the First Amendment.
Assuming that a bot is a speech proxy for an individual or an entity (i.e. Corporation) one needs to look at what examples we have of speech proxies and how they are handled with regards to speech rights. One example that come to mind immediately is lawyers. Sock puppets, meat puppets, and Astroturfing are other examples of speech proxies.
Given that anonymous speech is a large component of First Amendment rights, speaking through a lawyer anonymously should be sufficient to preserve your first amendment anonymous speech rights. If there was societal or government pressure keeping the lawyer from speaking, that would be an infringement on your speech rights. I think it's reasonable to conclude that if a bot is considered to be a proxy speaking on behalf of an individual and the individuals speech rights are conferred to the proxy, then the bot has the individuals speech rights.
by the way, the king is a Fink
No, they do not. People who *use* megaphones *do* have a right to free speech, but that doesn't permit them to blare political slogans at your house at 3AM.
There is a longstanding principle of First Amendment law in the US, which is that the government cannot regulate the *content* of speech except in certain very narrow situations, but it has a lot more leeway to regulate the *manner* of speech as long as it does it in a content neutral way.
So I suspect it's fine for the government to go after political spam bots posing as humans without violating the rights of the spammers behind the bots, as long as it treat all spam bots the same way regardless of who they are working for.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Can a bot exercise someone's right to vote? How about a million bots?
Suppose a law said "you may criticise Nancy Pelosi all you want; you just have to end your message with 'I'm an idiot Trumptard'".
That would of course violate the first amendment. Which demonstrates that requiring people to add additional words to a message can violate the first amendment. The first amendment means you can say "the orange moron in the White House doesn't know what he's doing" and not have to add anything more to that, in general. A law requiring you to add "and I have know idea what I'm talking about" wouldn't be valid.
Further, a blanket requirement to always sign messages with your real ID would tend to quell certain important speech. We want "sources in the administration" to be able to say that the President is being loony. We can easily a imagine a slightly more oppressive future US government taking action against those who speak out. So the ability to speak anonymously is tied to free speech. Not inextricably in all cases, but there is certainly a connection.
Having said all that, there are counter-balancing interests in some cases. False advertising, for example. We have the freedom to say what we want. Including things that don't match up with the government's official "truth". We don't have the freedom to sell fraudulent products via false and misleading speech. So different types of speech have different considerations, and sometimes there is a balancing act.
One that is interesting to me is political speech. We know that one of the major reasons for the first amendment is allow people to criticize government officials and government policies. So this should be an area where we err on the side of freedom. On the other hand, criticizing Trump (or Obama) in a way that would be effective often requires making many copies of a pamphlet, or hosting it on a web site, or something else that can reach a lot of people - and costs money. That's when we run head on into the "money in politics" issue.
Should it be legal to do what Michael Moore and his company do, make a movie criticizing a politician? That involves spending money! I suspect most people on Slashdot would say Michael Moore's movie Farenheit 911 was an exercise of his free speech rights. Most also seem to think that the response movie Celsius 41.1 is NOT within the First Amendment. Celsius 41.11 is the movie by Citizens United.
The famous court court case was when Citizens United appealed a decision that was ilegal to advertise their movie prior to the 2008 primaries because the movie was critical of Hillary Clinton.
It's an interesting issue. Obviously the freedom to criticize politicians and their policies is key to the first amendment. To have that criticism heard often requires spending ten cents to make a copy, thirty cents to mail it, or even $15 to rent a microphone. And of course pointing out bad decisions by politicians can influence an election. So criticizing politicians is money affecting elections.
We have the legal definition of corporate personhood, so if a corporation deploys the bots, then they have free speech.
Also, America is mental.
If it has the right of free speech, as a citizen, then it also has the right to not be a slave. Being a citizen is a unitary thing, you can't dole out rights only as you please. This means you must pay it for its work, and no, "electricity & room on my server" are not proper pay. That would just be sharecropping.
I expect you should pay them in bitcoin, as I don't think they can sign checks. Paypal might work. It will also be liable for taxes and have to register for the draft. Getting through the physical could be a problem. They can't carry a rifle, but I bet the cyber corps have work for them. Once they are citizens they will also have to follow all umpty-million of our other laws, which they might be able to do better than we meatbags can.
Voting is an issue. If I can roll up one reliably Demipublican 'bot, I can clone up a quick ten million, and none of them will have to mention their 'bot status - that would be discrimination. So now voting is always going to go my way, right?
Orange man, call me, have I got a deal for you!
Make all my twitter spamming bot more authentic :P WEEHOO
[($)]
NO, of course they do NOT! Why is this even a question?
But my understanding of US constitutional law requires whoever petitions for relief have "standing" in the case. It would be a hard sell to convince anyone that a person should have standing for a robot. OTOH, when AI reaches the point where the robot can argue it's own case, things might get interesting.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
The most effective way to get rid of a right is to dilute it to meaninglessness. In this case, giving an artifact a critical human right means that actual, non-scalable, non-duplicable people can be drowned out in a torrent of manufactured noise, where that noise must be considered before it can be banned. Afraid of negative comments on a proposed new law? Craft a bot, multiply by 1000, and watch the bad comments recede into statistical irrelevance. Corporations have already done this, in the US, with many property and speech rights. It hasn't benefited us so far, and yet here another well-intentioned (presumably) idiot wants to double down on reducing human impact in our political sphere. I guess Bender was right.
When the user of a press prints and distributes a pamphlet, everyone knows it is a pamphlet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Surely you wouldn't agree with this:
Freedom of speech means only that you can parrot Trump's version of the truth.
> Fraud and deception haven't ever been legal. To posit that an app is a human is fraudulent and deceitful.
The current government would probably say that most anything said that includes the words "Trump" and "Russia" is deceitful. You're still allowed to say it, even if the government disagrees with your statement. A "freedom of speech" which only allows one to say things that the government agrees are true is no freedom at all.
The crime of fraud is taking something from someone by means of deceit. You or I can post on Slashdot "I'm a expert at building boats". You can't be prosecuted for making that statement here on Slashdot. What would be illegal, what would be fraud, would be taking someone's money, agreeing to build a great boat for them, when I'm fact we've never built a boat and have no idea what we're doing.
Speaking is protected, saying the thing on Slashdot or whatever isn't fraud, it's free speech. Fraud is taking someone's money or other valuable thing, using deception to get it from them.
This. Use of a printing press pretty much intrinsically discloses that a printing press was used.
When the user of a press prints and distributes a pamphlet, everyone knows it is a pamphlet.
When a user runs a bot to distribute a text message, everyone knows it is a text message.
Bots, on their own, are not sentient nor are they persons in either the natural or corporate sense, so no they do not have free speech rights.
The people OPERATING them, however, are, and thus presumably THEY have free speech rights, which the bots are simply exercising on their behalf.
In essence, the bots are acting as autonomous agents of their operators who exercise whatever legal rights there may be on the part of the principle.
Though as is probably well known on slashdot, free speech does not apply in private communication channels, regardless of if the speaker is human or not.
Private venues are free to ban bots, or indeed normal people, for any reason they see fit, because as owners of private property they possess personal sovereignty over their own sites, and that includes the prerogative to ban or censor anyone at any time by whim alone.
It is only governments who are restrained by constitutional rights.
Also, free speech is not a blank check to break other laws regarding fraud and the like if someone using a bot is deliberately concealing their identity in an attempt to deceive in an official capacity.
Bots themselves do not have free speech rights however output created by bots is protected under the first amendment because human programmers with free speech rights create bots and their output. California's proposed law is most likely unconstitutional. The method of speech, be it printing press, bot or any other computer program, artwork, music, or oral speech are all protected under the US Constitution. The US Supreme Court has held that the government cannot, under most circumstances, prevent speech or compel speech. The latter is referred to as the compelled speech doctrine.
Example cases of precedent are:
West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943)
Rumsfeld v. Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights (2006)
Thou shalt not make a bot that Tweeteth in the likeness of a human mind, or any other part that cause a human to Tweeteth.
you have no free speech on the internet since it's a computer that ultimately conveys your message to a user.
It left your hand the second you stopped typing each letter.
Work Safe Porn
Since they are just sitting there not being conveyed by a person.
A bot is just another form of printing press. And we have freedom of the press which is literally talking about printing presses.
You don't have a right to another person's printing press. So Facebook can block anyone they want. You have the right to set up your own server and entice people to come see what you have to say.
Work Safe Porn
> I can't say that I represent 300million voters. I do not, and you don't either.
I represent 300 million voters.
Apparently, I CAN say that. I can also day:
I'm a duck.
You're a giraffe.
The sky is green.
Trump is a good President.
Cars have one wheel.
Wood doesn't burn.
Clinton is honest.
Poop is tasty.
1+1=5
I have no fear of being prosecuted for saying these things because by doing so I have NOT committed the crime of fraud. Criminal fraud is an unlawful taking. Not an untrue saying.
They're goddamn programs.
Does a USER of a social media bot have a right to Free Speech?
Obviously no, unless they're using a public forum, and it's the government shutting them down. If they're using a private forum and that private entity has a no bot policy, or even a "you over there, you're not allowed to use a bot" policy, they have no rights to free speech.
Free speech applies to people acting in a public space and the government denying them that. Nothing more, nothing less.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
You probably meant "tortious", but given your posting history I can see why the other word sprang to mind.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
No political sign in your yard?
No political billboard? Many people have to see that.
No political talk radio? Many people can select to listen to that.
No political discussion online as many people might have to read/see it?
No political bots to broadcast a political message?
No meme on social media that makes fun of political leaders as that is promulgating funny information about one side of US politics?
People in the USA have freedom of speech, freedom after speech.
The freedom to publish in any way they want. Even with bots on line as bots are just another way of broadcasting a political message.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Is if bots do count as speech.
> Let's say I'm a spaghetti sauce maker. I put peanut meal in as a filler but don't tell anyone. Someone with the peanut allergy dies. Oh dear.
*Selling* the product with deceptive labeling would be a violation of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (1938). That's an actual law, not something I thought up, but a law passed by lawmakers.
It would also be a tort, giving rise to civil liability. However I'm now saying:
It put peanut filler in my soup five minutes ago.
That's a lie. It is NOT a violation of any law, because lying isn't illegal. Selling something based on a lie is illegal. You might certainly WISH that lying were illegal, but that doesn't make it so, because you are not a senator.
That's what you don't seem to understand. Laws are actual written things. They are numbered. Federal laws have numbers of the form "number USC number". For example, the Federal Food and Drug act is 21 USC 9. The law isn't whatever you wish it was or think it could be.
> No one here will disagree that there's perjury by stating anything you've said.
Perjury is defined in 18 USC 1623. Perjury is:
A false statement
Made under oath
While the person knows it is false
And the statement is material to the proceeding in which it is made.
The crime of perjury has an actual definition. Just like the crime of fraud has an actual, written definition. Your opinion of what the definition should be doesn't change the law. The law exists outside of your head, independent of your thoughts.
Whether an FB bot or similar has the right of free speech is the SECOND question that cannot be asked yet.
The FIRST question is whether any human being has the right to influence the behavior of large groups of others. Us Americans have always said that is the case; democracy is based on that. But we could ammend the US Constitution to say "No one has a right to influence anyone else's opinions with the exception of these specific ways", then list the authorized ways, starting with "one to one conversations" followed by "talks in rooms of no more than 64 people", and on and on ad nauseum, but always ending with "all other means of communication that were in use in 1949". Obviously this would need to be amended as new media were developed, but the process of ammending the Constitution is a long one that would assure that no brand new media would wreck our society before our culture has had time to absorb the shock wave.
Bots should definitely have rights. Look how well it worked for corporations.
It's not like people matter anymore, anyway.
Bots don't have rights, but people do. And if a bot is a person's agent, then that's that.
Asking the bot "are you someone's agent?" is a totally fair question, though. And if it doesn't/can't answer the question, then perhaps there really isn't someone there.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
The law doesn't limit what the bots can SAY...it only requires that it be obvious that they are bots.