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Comment by roddylindsay | Hacker News Reader

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roddylindsay

What was the initial message?

A bot pretending to be a human for the purposes of political persuasion is a crime in California.

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Oh holy hell, I totally forgot about that. I'll update the post, because this is pretty bad:

"Hi, I'm Liz working to elect Ron DeSantis. Do you have a minute to answer a couple of questions?"

Some thorny legal questions for sure. We wrote about it here: https://aipoliticalpulse.substack.com/p/is-that-a-pile-of-gp...

What’s the bar for “pretending”? Is mere omission of their unnatural status considered deception?

"17941. (a) It shall be unlawful for any person to use a bot to communicate or interact with another person in California online, with the intent to mislead the other person about its artificial identity for the purpose of knowingly deceiving the person about the content of the communication in order to incentivize a purchase or sale of goods or services in a commercial transaction or to influence a vote in an election. A person using a bot shall not be liable under this section if the person discloses that it is a bot."

It says online though so it might not apply to SMS. Seems like a pretty big oversite.

(b) “Online” means appearing on any public-facing Internet Web site, Web application, or digital application, including a social network or publication.

SMS could be a considered a "digital application", so it might apply. Agree that it could use clarification.

If the message originated from twilio there would probably be an argument that that’s “online”

Something tells me this wouldn't hold up in South Carolina.

Clearly we need a new first-person pronoun for the exclusive use of bots, so there's never any confusion. I propose "O", as in I/O.

> A bot pretending to be a human for the purposes of political persuasion is a crime in California.

I've never heard of this. I assume the actual crime is in a human being setting up such a bot, since a bot cannot commit a crime?

https://www.natlawreview.com/article/california-s-bot-disclo...

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