California wants all of the bots in the room to please stand up. Last week the state enacted a bill that makes it illegal to use undeclared bots to incentivize a sale or influence an election. A bot—at least according to California’s new law—is an automated online account where most of the posts or actions taken are not the result of an actual human being.
After bots were used to spread misinformation during the presidential election of 2016, social media giants like Facebook and Twitter were left with the unenviable task of separating flesh-and-blood users from the ghosts in the machine. In an entry posted to the company’s blog earlier this week, Twitter said that it challenged an average of 9.4 million accounts each week in the first half of September in an effort to identify automated presences.
