Sen. Dianne Feinstein has introduced the Bot Disclosure and Accountability Act, a proposal to regulate social media bots in a roundabout fashion. The bill has several shortcomings.
Automation of social media use exists on a continuum, from simple software that allows users to schedule posts throughout the day, to programs that scrape and share information about concert ticket availability, or automatically respond to climate change skeptics. Bots may provide useful services, or flood popular topics with nonsense statements in an effort to derail debate. They often behave differently across different social media platforms; Reddit bots serve different functions than Twitter bots.
What level of automation renders a social media account a bot? Sen. Feinstein isn’t sure, so she’s relinquishing that responsibility to the Federal Trade Commission:
The term ‘‘automated software program or process intended to impersonate or replicate human activity online’’ has the meaning given the term by the [Federal Trade] Commission
If Congress wants to attempt to regulate Americans’ use of social media management software, they should do so themselves. Instead, they would hand the hard and controversial work of defining a bot to the FTC, dodging democratic accountability in the process. Moreover, the bill demands that the FTC define bots “broadly enough so that the definition is not limited to current technology”, virtually guaranteeing initial overbreadth.
Read more at https://www.cato.org/blog/new-bill-would-ban-internet-bots-speech
No comments:
Post a Comment