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Will this apply to bots? What if I have a big list of a complaints about a certain politician (use your imagination, there's more than one politician to complai
by Buttons840 4y ago
Will this apply to bots? What if I have a big list of a complaints about a certain politician (use your imagination, there's more than one politician to complain about), but the "other party" doesn't follow me, in fact, I have very few followers overall.
So I create a bot that spreads my opinions by replying to millions of other Tweets. Anyone who mentions the politician of interest will receive a reply from "me" (my bot) within 2 minutes. Now I will be heard by millions, and my lawyer is ready should I be banned from the entire site.
Now imagine many people doing this, what a cesspool, you make a Tweet and the bot flood gates open. You Tweet about your grandchild and 30 seconds later you have 400 replies expressing "political opinions" about shady websites with cheap Viagra. Twitter can't ban them though. Welcome to truly free speech. You better learn to code if you want to be heard.
We're already at the point where websites can't control bots. AI that can write better than most humans is knocking on the door, and it can run on my personal computer. This law will only make it worse by adding real legal risk to banning suspected bots.
Am I exaggerating here, or is this actually possible? This feels like a loss in the humans vs bots battle more than a political one.
- TobyTheDog123 4y ago> Users cannot have their speech limited on these platforms "Will this also apply to [completely unrelated issue]? Bet they didn't think of that." What?
- Nursie 4y agoYou’re being downvotes, but that is basically a classic tech-guy retort to most things that affect any sort of service they like. “I can draw a vague parallel with this other thing, so clearly it’s basically like the nazis and/or stalin”
- hot_gril 4y ago> Will this apply to bots? Most likely it'll apply in whatever cases Texas's govt wants. That is, the vague law will be basis for selective enforcement, like GDPR. There's no other way this can work.
- teawrecks 4y agoOnce they figure it out they'll write a special case against using bots, but troll farms will be alive and well. At which point the site will switch to more stringent sign up requirements, as another post said.
- Brybry 4y agoI'm not a lawyer but I don't think this would apply to bots. The Texas law text[1] says it only protects 'users' which are defined as people. And even then the law only prohibits censorship for specific reasons. It doesn't say companies can't ban users for running bots. Even if the messages the bot is posting are protected the fact of running the bot itself should still be a bannable offense if it's not allowed in the TOS. [1] https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/872/billtext/html/HB00020F.htm https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/872/billtext/html/HB00020F...
- patmcc 4y agoSo can I hire someone from a low cost-of-living jurisdiction and get them to behave like a bot for me?
- bojangleslover 4y agoOldest trick in the book
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- omgwtfbyobbq 4y agoProbably, but I don't they that should be allowed. I suppose someone with an applicable disability could also use software/automation to they point where they can post more than someone without that disability.
- giaour 4y agoThe line between "user" and "bot" would get very murky very quickly. If you write a tweet and then use a bot to post it at a certain time of day, is your speech still protected, even if it was posted by a bot? What if you have the bot post it at the same time every day? What if you have the bot post it in reply to all tweets with a certain hashtag? Or just all tweets? In each of those cases, the original speech is a user's, and the bot is merely following the human user's publication instructions.
- coffeeblack 4y agoLet each user block what they don’t want to see. With filters, ai, etc. Don’t have a centralized “overlord” decide what an individual is allowed to see. That should be obvious and not controversial.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- programmarchy 4y agoYeah this makes the most sense. There’s probably enough local compute power to run these filters on the client. But that’s a huge power shift and the change is likely more political than technological.
- lanstin 4y agoDoubtful. With the rise of natural language spam, you have to analyze it in terms of networks or social graphs of bots reinforcing each other. E.g. a lot of bots will comment positively on other bots spam posts, in a manner very similar to my agreeing with some human. It is data bounded, not compute bounded. Will Twitter be forced to open their full internal conversation graph, including using real IPs probably for accurate targeting, to companies writing spam modules? It seems weirdly implausible.
- hedora 4y agoYelp's not recommended reviews are a great example of why this is data bounded (assuming Yelp's filter is halfway decent).
- CJefferson 4y agoHaving run a mail server, I don't think it's reasonable to expect most people to contain the deluge of spam and phishing attacks they would get if just told them to "sort it out" themselves.
- adventured 4y ago
- hailwren 4y agoIn Reamde, Neal Stephenson posits a future where we pay individuals/services to filter and prioritize the unordered deluge of data from the web. It seems like this ruling pushes us along that path.
- cpeterso 4y agoIf "social media" services aren't allow filter posts, could Twitter spin off the "social media" service to a new, wholly owned subsidiary company and retain twitter.com as a web client free to filter the service's posts?
- drexlspivey 4y agoWelcome to microdata refinement
- tbcj 4y agoCan’t wait for my melon bar and the music dance experience.
- ekianjo 4y agoYou mean like youtube making it premium not to see ads?
- hailwren 4y agoIt's more like the web is a model and you pay someone to curate a personal view of it for you. Instead of going to different news/social websites, it is filtered by someone and streamed directly to you.
- caeril 4y agoNot the same. I pay for YouTube premium but the algorithm continues to push: 1. Political content that is not only unaligned, but diametrically opposed to political content I've previously consumed. 2. Random "Free" movie and youtube original content suggestions (effectively ads, on a supposedly ad-free account).
- 4y ago
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- calculatte 4y agoThat's basically what Twitter is right now, with the exception that their moderators ban those they don't agree with. So you get millions of sockpuppets saying the same thing. What a great way to manufacture consent.
- dustedcodes 4y agoThis was exactly my thought when I read the OP's message.
- nmilo 4y agoI would actually like this. Imagine if online discussion was so visibly bad that no one used it anymore. Talk to real people. Go outside.
- smt88 4y agoYouTube comments used to be that bad. People still read them.
- 14 4y agoWell you kind of need to ever since the dislike count was removed.
- themitigating 4y agoYou checked the dislike count before reading the comment? That's almost a superpower of visual focus since they are next to each other Edit -Didn't realize he meant video counts
- ipaddr 4y agoParent is referencing seeing the total dislike summary that appeared before the comment section where you are talking about dislikes on each comment.
- nyuszika7h 4y agoSome people have social anxiety.
- wussboy 4y agoThey have social anxiety because they never went outside. “Outside” and “with other people” are our ancestral environment. Social media is abnormal and makes abnormal people.
- 4y ago
- tjs8rj 4y agoIt’s really not this complicated at all, and arguments like this just come across like reaching for a rebuttal. What these people want is very simple: a clear standard uniformly applied and not done so in a partisan fashion. Everyone is onboard with preventing the scenario you brought up: it’s not killing free speech, it’s stopping egregious spam. This is completely orthogonal to that. This is about not getting banned for disagreeing with one side’s political ideology. We’ve managed to do that before - even just a decade ago, and manage to do it now on other platforms, all without ridiculous hypotheticals like this one every occurring. One your last paragraph: yes, you’re 100% exaggerating. This scenario is as reasonable as saying “legal self defense is dangerous because just think of all the bad actors that will murder and call it self defense!”. It’s just nonsense and goes against all evidence.
- wumpus 4y agoCongrats, you're reinventing this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serdar_Argic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serdar_Argic
- barber5 4y agoUsers should protect themselves from this. With the expectation that they will, there will be tons of tools available and this scenario will be a nonstarter. Decentralized defenses against bots will be far more effective than the central planning of information ecosystems we have today. Just watch.
- kelnos 4y agoDo you really think the average non-technical user will have a clue as to what to do about this hypothetical problem? I don't think that's a credible take. Consider that this situation isn't like email spam filtering. I can't run a spam filter on the Twitter app on my phone. And if Twitter is not allowed to filter spam, that's it: no spam filtering for Twitter users.
- idle_zealot 4y ago> I can't run a spam filter on the Twitter app on my phone That's nothing fundamentally preventing this. It's Twitter themselves who've decided not to allow you to do this. Were their app more open to extension you would be able to download and configure a spam filter of your choosing.
- joshuamorton 4y agoAre they allowed to provide a default filter?
- coredog64 4y agoThis is it exactly: Apply the same rules that they have today for content moderation, but allow users to opt in to that filtering. Even if they apply it by default, that’s probably enough of an fig lead to get by this ruling.
- idle_zealot 4y agoThey can provide a first-party/recommended filter, but like with default browsers, search engines, or other preferences, the app should present the user with the choice in clear terms rather than silently applying the default. Defaults are powerful, so having the app apply its default first-party filter and hide away the option to change it in some menu would be approximately equivalent to changing nothing but forcing Twitter to act as a datastore/api for competing microblogging platforms.
- eternityforest 4y agoCan't they just ban all mass-botting? That doesn't have anything to do with speech, it's just banning what amounts to spambots.
- guywithahat 4y agoI was assuming your question would be answered in the article but I guess they really didn't go into much detail. The short answer is no; the law is much more narrow than that, more about banning politicians to influence elections and bots are excluded.
- taf2 4y agoThis does not sound to me like an issue of free speech more of one of you abusing an online service. Use of a bot maybe is against the services tos. So it’s not the content of your message rather the method you abused to spread it?
- StanislavPetrov 4y agoThis ruling appears to apply to the content of speech. There's nothing that says you couldn't rate limit replies to prevent spam. Limiting posts to 1 per 30 seconds, or linking the number of replies you are allowed per day to your rate of organic interactions with other people would be a way to effectively eliminate these sort of bots without censoring based on content.
- catiopatio 4y agoThey're free to ban bots. That would clearly be a viewpoint-neutral restriction on content/behavior. "Using a bot" isn't a viewpoint, and banning bots is not a viewpoint-based restriction on user expression. This is a very well-explored area of law, and nobody is confused about the definitions of the terms used here. Even the government has reasonable authority to restrict speech based on time, place, or manner (e.g. by disallowing amplified sound systems).
- mojzu 4y agoIsn't having access to Twitter similar to the use of a sound amplification system? Being removed from Twitter does not remove your ability to speak, move to another smaller platform or setup your own platform, it just reduces your potential audience/reduces your volume. While I'm not a fan of the concentration of power in a few big companies, this outcome is in alignment with current definitions of free speech (private entities get to choose who can use their property)
- lossolo 4y agoThe problem here is accountability, with traditional solutions you can't have accountability and anonymity, anonymity encourages bad behaviour but also encourages sharing your thoughts without censoring yourself, maybe in future you will be only allowed to post when your account is registered using your special ID that every citizen will get from government saying "this is a real person" but you will not know who it is, and then appealing blocked account will be regulated by special law for social networks with more than x million users. This will limit bot usage to minimum, free speech problem would be partially solved because now you can be identified the same way as you would on the street IF you break the law but if you are not breaking any law then social network employees or other participants in the social network will not know who you are or know what's your name if you don't want them to. Maybe something like that would work?
- bboygravity 4y agoYou're literally describing Twitter here. Source: search for "Peñabots". There are great detailed documentaries about how far this went. That's one example, but this is ongoing for every major (geo)political topic and big businesses / hedge funds and the media "news" companies they own.
- hsn915 4y agoYou are conflating two things: 1) The right to publish content that is not in line with mainstream politics 2) The right to spam replies against tweets of people you don't follow (directly or indirectly) for the purpsoe of marketing These two things are largely orthogonal.
- hedora 4y agoGreat. Point to the line of the law that makes this distinction.
- quickthrower2 4y ago> Texas law that bars large social media companies from banning or censoring users based on "viewpoint," But this doesn’t mention barring banning accounts because they break ToS about bot usage.
- chaps 4y agoOne thing you can do, though it would take a lot of energy, is to add a "submit" button to your bot that you would have to click in order to tweet each tweet. That way it would be you who tweets it, though a bot did the hard work.
- tolmasky 4y agoThen, as an optimization, you change the text to “submit 100 times”, and now it’s you that posted 100 of those tweets. Also, a little timer field where you tell it how long to wait until it tweets it. Perfect.
- hedora 4y agoOr, buy a video game controller / mouse with a turbo button.
- esperent 4y agoI've heard of a good idea to prevent this (besides captchas), which is that if a user/bot needs to be rate limited, the service starts to require a small proof of work task to be done, something that would take a typical device a few seconds. If you have a genuine need to post something, waiting 5 seconds is not a big problem. But if your goal is to spam 1000 of something, now you need to wait 5 seconds between each post, and the task can be made progressively harder so that by item 1000 it's a 5 hour calculation rather than 5 seconds.
- cronix 4y agoI assume so, from reading this (posted in a deeper reply) Sec. 120.002. APPLICABILITY OF CHAPTER. (a) This chapter applies only to a user who: (3) shares or receives content on a social media platform in this state.
- imgabe 4y agoTo use a bot you need to register an API key for it. Twitter or such could simply revoke the API access. The user is still free to post manually and their free speech is not impinged.
- hedora 4y agoYou could just screen scrape and submit that way. Twitter noticing and blocking your user account doesn't get them off the hook, according to the definition of user in the law.
- imgabe 4y agoDoesn't it? Pretty sure the Terms of Service would say something about not accessing the service in an automated fashion, except through the official API. They would be banning you then based on a ToS violation, not because of any viewpoint.
- BlueTemplar 4y agoRemember how Twitter heavily restricted its API in 2014, with a lot of collateral damage for startups depending on it ?
- rychco 4y agoThis is quite literally already happening
- TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y agoThe solution is an individual's freedom of association. Something more intuitive than the block function or setting account to private, would be nice though.
- ekianjo 4y agoyou can easily prevent that kind of oversized influence by throttling bots, either by volume or frequency of messaging.
- ikiris 4y agoThis fails even basic scrutiny. They can diversify the feed sources by volume.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y agoYou are under the assumption that Twitter or other platforms will not innovate or attempt to adapt to the new legal landscape they find themselves in. Give users intuitive filters? Give users the ability to create invite-only communities? Etc.
- nathias 4y agofree speech is no censorship because of the content of your speech, if you're spamming that isn't really a free speech issue
- visarga 4y ago> Twitter can't ban them though. People should be able to opt into a variety of filters, some even provided by third parties, to clean their feed according to their views. That won't cause an issue with the senders as the receivers are entitled to filter what they read. People can have control but Twitter can't dictate.
- towaway15463 4y agoYour scenario makes no sense. The law isn’t a magic shield you can apply to any thing by just mentioning politics. Your bots could still be banned for abusing the platform or sharing links to malicious sites. The law just means that Twitter can’t ban you specifically for political opinions.
- naillo 4y agoThis is already happening basically and twitter aren't banning anyway. (Try mentioning any drug or being 'hacked' or needing an 'essay' written, you'll get a flood of replies in a few minutes.)