Social media, artificial profiles, and reputation protection. How the advent of social bot for managing social media profiles can pose a serious threat to people’s reputations and what might be the responses to this danger

Abstract

The use of social media has allowed anyone to spread their thoughts with a speed and a capillarity that eclipse those of the large traditional press companies. Within these “virtual squares” also operate the so-called “social bot”, programs that, once provided with the login credentials of an account, are capable of managing it independently, but giving the impression of being a real person. Their rapidity and precision of reaction on social networks make these “digital tools” dangerously useful for the dissemination of insinuations, slanders and offenses with a breadth and speed that can irreparably destroy the reputation of anyone who is targeted by their administrators. The current legal system for the protection of victims of defamation, despite the recent jurisprudential rulings on the online dissemination of falsehoods and the extension of the use of remedies, such as preventive seizure to social networks, still risks being ineffective when confronting a well-concerted use of these “socialbot”. Not even the countermeasures introduced by the owners of social media have been able to effectively stem this phenomenon. Thus, it is necessary to rethink the protection of reputation extending it to the prevention of improper use of IT tools that are now within everyone’s reach. Therefore, various hypotheses are proposed in this article for solving the problem, including the extension to the owners of social media of the obligation of "customer due diligence" already existing for financial operators or the establishment of an obligation for social media owners to set up an internal reporting system with also a mark visible to the other users of the content deemed defamatory.