Speaking of robot advertising, domestic readers are familiar with that.
In recent years, from the inexplicable email and text messages in the early days to the various telephone harassment nowadays, so that the author and his colleagues heard a “ah” ” Hello! “every time, and immediately hang up the phone, for fear that if they listen to one more sentence, they will be sick. We’re afraid that many people will have the same feeling of being harassed by bots.
Such a situation is not uncommon in the field of electronic cigarettes in the United States.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee and the Massachusetts attorney general have asked the five largest e-cigarette manufacturers whether they rely on automated robots for marketing activities.
Among them, the three major companies include Reynolds American, the second largest tobacco company in the United States, Juuling lab, Japan Tobacco International USA, as well as the famous e-liquid manufacturer Fontem Ventures, Njoy LLC, etc. all of the above companies have said that they have not used robots for marketing activities.
In the past two years, e-cigarettes have attracted a lot of attention, from the “mysterious” lung disease that caused the anti smoking campaign, to legislation to prevent young people from vaping e-cigarettes, to today’s spam marketing events, which have attracted extensive attention of the U.S. government.
In addition to the e-cigarette spam marketing, the U.S. Congress’s spam inspection activities also include the promotion of pornographic content and the destruction of democracy and other content.
Robot spam is a unique modern problem, and it may attract a lot of people’s attention. In a study funded by the New Jersey based Nicholson foundation, researchers studied 1.2 million twitter messages related to e-cigarettes or tobacco, with 77 percent of the message coming from accounts believed to be robots.
However, according to Amelia Howard from Vaping360, above study by New Jersey is fake and there is no solid proof for twitter bot advertising. This study is dehumanizing vape ban protesters and unfair.
In addition to several major e-cigarette manufacturers, Congress also inquired about including some sex product manufacturers.
For now, what Congress wants to know is whether robot driven social media posts are being used for deceptive or misleading activities. Some people think that industries such as e-cigarettes and sex products are heavily dependent on social media because it is more attractive to young people. But it’s hard to determine who is responsible for robots, because they are often used by companies’ contractors, and there’s no national law requiring robots to identify themselves as automated, which leads to the abuse of robot marketing.
