The US Supreme Court has ruled that if a 'clinic' is essentially a place where people do their best to convince women not to have abortions, it cannot be compelled to post a notice on its premises telling its customers that it is not licensed to provide medical care, even though that is true. This is the result of a corollary understanding of the free speech clause of the 1st Amendment--the US government cannot prohibit most types of speech, nor can it compel most types of speech. Under this corollary, it appears within the realm of possibility that the US Supreme Court could rule that the California law is unconstitutional. Only the first section of the article is quoted below.
'Do Bots Have First Amendment Rights?'
Once again, Facebook’s management is contorting itself over reports that it denied and ignored Russian trolls and bots that had infested its platform to sway the 2016 election. But even as Facebook has vowed to stamp out these malicious bots, it and other platforms have pushed their own chatbots as the next wave in communication and marketing. These charming, chatty bots that currently pervade Facebook Messenger largely focus on selling stuff and otherwise interacting with business customers.
Of course, anyone who has interacted with even the most sophisticated bots today can quickly tell the bot is not human. They lack flexibility, return too quickly to a script or simply provide anodyne and evasive answers in order to stall for time. Nevertheless, when they operate on a narrow band, they can perform well. Google’s Duplex can book a hair salon appointment or restaurant reservation in ways that are eerily convincing.
But as bots continue to develop their own machine learning intelligence, does it make sense to ask whether they themselves have rights equivalent to the humans they are imitating?
“There is a rough consensus among experts that automated speech such as that generated by online bots” at least implicates the First Amendment, writes law professor Ryan Calo of the University of Washington School of Law. Those rights may yield to other important interests, but any law or regulation of bots, Calo argues, must at least grapple with the First Amendment right of those using the bots, or of the bots themselves.
The question of bot-speech-rights suddenly took on real-world significance this summer when California passed what is, perhaps, the first bot law. This law, going into effect next summer, requires online bots to identify themselves as bots, at least those that interact with human beings trying to sell stuff or promote a candidate in an election.
The motivation for the law was clear: Russian bots had infected our election. They spread fake news, and even when their bots promoted true stories, those stories tended to drown out organic discussion among real Americans. The bots could trigger trends of Russia’s preferred stories, distorting the entire discourse. California’s law, therefore, seems to many a sensible balance between free speech and regulation. “The law is the right call,” said Helen Norton, a law professor at the University of Colorado Law School studying free speech in the contemporary landscape. In a democracy, she said, voters need to know where their messages are coming from. Professor Toni Massaro at the University of Arizona College of Law agreed: “I think states should be given some room to experiment with these things. Whether they’ll be given the room by the Roberts court remains to be seen.”
Indeed, if the Supreme Court’s recent rulings on First Amendment cases are any indication, the California bots law might soon become the next example of the willingness to “weaponize” the First Amendment—in the words of Justice Elena Kagan.
That’s because bot rights, and the new California disclosure law, sit at the juncture of several strands of free speech doctrine that might come together in a uniquely powerful way: the free speech rights of corporations; the right against being compelled to say something, as opposed to being banned from saying something; the right to anonymous speech; and finally, the right to lie.
“If they stick to their logical guns on all [these] points—it points to extremely robust free speech rights for bots. That’s the short answer,” Massaro said.