> curbing social bots may be an effective strategy for mitigating the spread of online misinformation.
Why not turn them off entirely? The least of self regulation these popular social media companies can do for humans.
Why not turn them off entirely? The least of self regulation these popular social media companies can do for humans.
The actors who may be motivated to mitigate these harms, i. e. the social networks and possibly governments would face problems very similar to those with (other) spam, namely identification. Of course the history of spam filters makes me optimistic that it's feasible put a rather significant dent in the problem with even just modest efforts.
Summary: It's more of a semantic difference, arguably more precise because there is no off switch as such.
A good argument must imply that social media bots are a net benefit to society and democracy, not that some good ones exist.
The collateral damage from banning them all may be worth it, if they're a major means for pushing low credibility content and disinformation.
The idea that AIs (broadly defined to include simple bots) are net more trouble than they are worth has been kicked around in literature forever. It’s fun to live in the age where we get to wrestle with it in practice.
Are you sure you want to accelerate this arms race?
That's not what happened with email spam. The spammers lost the arms race.
I remember email before Gmail. I used to delete hundreds of spam messages a day. It was torture. Not anymore. Now my inbox is all legit mail with vanishingly few spam messages. And my junk mail folder almost never has legit mail in it. For all intents and purposes the email spam problem is solved.
And legit important mails ending in spam (mostly billing) is a huge problem for many companies I know. On the other side you can spam without issue and end up in the primary box when you switch servers and providers frequently enough and target a small amount of people (under 100 000).