If I could convince every policymaker of one essential principle, it would be that what’s good for the biggest content industry businesses is not always good for creative workers or the public. In fact, in many cases these business interests are in direct conflict with creative workers. The latest example comes from “stealth bot prohibition” laws like the one recently introduced by Representatives Laurel Lee, Valerie Foushee, and Gus Bilirakis, which would put working journalists in danger in order to give news publishers more leverage in AI licensing negotiations.
In a nutshell, these bills make it unlawful to access a website using a “bot” (basically any technical tool) without declaring to the website (1) that it is a bot (not a human), (2) who sent the bot, and (3) what the bot’s user plans to do with the information the bot accesses on the site. Groups like the News Media Alliance, which represents the biggest corporate news publishers, love these bills because it helps their publisher members charge additional fees to bot users, including AI developers. But it’s not hard to imagine why actual working journalists might find these laws troubling.
For example, imagine you’re a journalist interested in investigating dynamic pricing or algorithmic bias. To test whether e-commerce platforms, airlines, or insurance companies charge different prices or show different options to users based on income, race, or zip code, journalists write scripts using automated browser tools that pretend to be ordinary human visitors across various locations and devices. Obviously it would be impossible to investigate these phenomena and prove (or disprove) any harmful effects if vendors are warned that the user is actually a bot engaged in journalism. So investigative reporters at outlets like The Markup and Pro Publica have used technical tools to automate data collection from websites while obscuring their identities as journalists. Under the “Stealth Bot Prohibition Act,” the Federal Trade Commission (over which the President now has total control) or any state attorney general upset about a story could bring a lawsuit to punish journalists for collecting data in the public interest.
Since almost any topic can benefit from data analysis, almost any journalist’s beat could be undercut by these bills. Housing and job discrimination, government accountability, education costs and outcomes, all can be illuminated by gathering data from online data sources controlled by parties who probably don’t want journalists looking into their practices. In an era when so many life-changing events, from finding a home to landing a job, take place online, journalists need “stealth bots” to explore how these systems work and hold their makers accountable when they misfire. Unfortunately, news media bosses are more interested in monetizing the truth than in uncovering and reporting it.