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Do Social Media Bots Have a Right To Free Speech?
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." |
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| There are no conversations. |
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| cauz |
Jan. 12, 2019, 3:15 p.m. |
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| Howard Gardner |
I believe that the brain has evolved over millions of years to be responsive to different kinds of content in the world. Language content, musical content, spatial content, numerical content, etc. |
| Herman Cain |
The Democrats co-opted the credit for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But if you go back and look at the history, a larger percentage of Republicans voted for that than did Democrats. But a Democrat president signed it, so they co-opted credit for having passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. |
| P. J. O'Rourke |
Positive rights are the right to shelter, the right to education, the right to health care, the right to a living wage. These things are - these are, I would call them, more properly, political rights rather than positive rights. And they are extremely tricky, because now we are dealing with things that are zero sum. |
| James Fenton |
When we study Shakespeare on the page, for academic purposes, we may require all kinds of help. Generally, we read him in modern spelling and with modern punctuation, and with notes. But any poetry that is performed - from song lyric to tragic speech - must make its point, as it were, without reference back. |
| Barack Obama |
We, the People, recognize that we have responsibilities as well as rights; that our destinies are bound together; that a freedom which only asks what's in it for me, a freedom without a commitment to others, a freedom without love or charity or duty or patriotism, is unworthy of our founding ideals, and those who died in their defense. |
| Noah Feldman |
The world is littered with constitutions that have written guarantees of rights but that don't actually deliver rights. What differentiates the ones where rights are real from where rights are fake is that it's in the initial interests of the majority to actually deliver these rights. |
| Ariel Garten |
Under the deluge of minute-to-minute text conversations, emails, relentless exchange of media channels and passwords and apps and reminders and tweets and tags, we lose sight of what all this fuss is supposed to be about in the first place: ourselves. |
| Thomas Jefferson |
All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression. |
| William Hague |
The Bill of Rights was intended to secure freedom of speech - the freedom of speech of members of parliament to speak freely rather than be at threat of... the threat of an over powerful monarch at the time. |
| Nick D'Aloisio |
There is a generation of skimmers. It's not that they don't want to read in-depth content, but they want to evaluate what the content is before they commit time. Especially on a mobile phone - you don't have the phone, or cellular data, or screen size to be reading full-length content. |
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Weaponized Health Communication: Twitter Bots
and Russian Trolls Amplify the Vaccine Debate
Objectives.
To understand how Twitter bots and trolls (
“
bots
”
) promote online health
...
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Advanced Hybrid Peer to Peer Botnet. The botnet requires no bootstrap procedure.
The botnet communicates via the peer list contained in each bot. However, unlike Slapper [8], each bot has a fixed and limited size peer list and does not reveal its peer list to other bots. In this way, when a bot is captured by defenders, only the limited number of bots in its peer list are exposed.
A botmaster could easily monitor the entire botnet by issuing a report command. This command instructs all (or partial) bots to report to a specific compromised machine (which is called a sensor host) that is cont...
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As long as free speech and free political association remain legal is all good tho. On the other hand, daddy is apparently determined to contort any news media to his version of fairness and his benefit of the doubt.
This post is a comment.
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It seems like the way to go is just to have a huge variety of different possible captchas, but I would think that once you have more than a couple bots working together to build models not even that would hold up forever. Abstractly, though, doesn't it boil down to this - Is there a set of problems that a human can answer easily and a computer cannot, but the computer can still recognize a correct answer easily? My instinct is that as soon as you define that set you can build a machine to generate solutions. But I guess the answer to the real question of whether it's worth it depends on if you can build a machine that builds machines that generate solutions. And I think for just the images alone the answer is probably yes - audio/video I'm less sure about.
This post is a comment.
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free as in beer AND free as in speech
This post is a comment.
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Dead People Mysteriously Support The FCC's Attack On Net Neutrality
We've noted for months how an unknown party has been using bots to bombard the FCC website with entirely bogus support for the agency's planned attack on net neutrality. Inquiries so far have indicated that whatever group or individual is behind the fake support used a bot that automatically pulled names -- in alphabetical order -- from a compromised database of some kind. Earlier this year one reporter actually managed to track down some of these folks -- who say they never filed such comments or in many instances had no idea what net neutrality even is.
Earlier this year, some reporters discovered that some of the bigges...
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Researchers Fool ReCAPTCHA With Google's Own Speech-To-Text Service
Researchers at the University of Maryland have managed to trick Google's reCaptcha system by using Google's own speech-to-text service. "[The researchers] claim that their CAPTCHA-fooling method, unCaptcha, can fool Google's reCaptcha, one of the most popular CAPTCHA systems currently used by hundreds of thousands of websites, with a 90 percent success rate," reports Motherboard. From the report:
The researchers originally developed UnCaptcha in 2017, which uses Google's own free speech-to-text service to trick the system into thinking a robot is a human. It's an oroborus of bots: According to their paper, UnCaptcha downl...
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I would die or even kill for my right to free speech.
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yeah but as soon as free speech isnt legal its a problem if they have a db of everything you said. you can be imprisoned for your words no doubt. rap lyrics are getting used in court more and more as well
This post is a comment.
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Daniel Dennett answers the question of the existence of free will by saying there are different kinds of free will and the one that becomes apparent from Laplacian determinism isn't worth wanting. This is entirely dissatisfying.
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