RightsCon Toronto 2018

This session aims to uncover the potential of social botnets to both advance and to harm rights, and asks whether this type of speech should be protected by human rights law, when, and to what degree. Social bots are being developed for good purposes—such as language learning, practicing social skills, providing guidance, information or entertainment—as well as purposes that pose serious risk to rights, such as trolling, spreading ‘fake news,’ or improperly influencing elections. Artificial intelligence applications are attempting to make social bots more ‘human’ by the day.

There are many questions about how bots should be treated under international human rights law, and therefore what principles should guide their development and regulation. Some that we would seek to explore include: are social bots, as code, themselves a form of protected expression? Are they a medium of expression, and if so, how different from advertisement or human rent-a-mobs? Will they eventually be sufficiently intelligent and autonomous to be protected speakers? Does it matter who creates, controls or deploys social bots, and how much does context determine whether there are rights issues?
Are there human rights downsides to weeding bots out of social media platforms? Will enforcing a rule that robots must be identified as robots be enough to solve the problem?