Last month, U.S. Reps. Laurel Lee (R-FL), Valerie Foushee (D-NC), and Rep. Gus Bilirakis (R-FL) introduced the Stealth Bot Prohibition Act, a bipartisan piece of transparency legislation that would require AI crawlers to identify themselves and their purpose before scraping a website, legislation aimed squarely at a problem Iowa publishers know well. Bots continue to make up a growing share of our traffic, and too many of them are built specifically to hide who they are and what they’re taking.
News/Media Alliance President and CEO Danielle Coffey called it a “sorely-needed, common-sense solution to a problem plaguing news publishers and other industries across the internet.” That’s exactly right. Newsrooms have been trying to fend off this traffic on our own for years, and the available tools aren’t built to catch bad actors who are actively working to disguise themselves.
States like Missouri, Nebraska, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and New York have already made progress with their own transparency laws, and that work matters. It’s built real momentum and proven this issue has support across the country. The Stealth Bot Prohibition Act builds on that foundation, giving publishers everywhere the same baseline protection no matter which state they’re in.
WHAT YOU CAN DO RIGHT NOW
This bill needs your voice. Contact your representatives today and tell them directly why this matters to your newsroom and your community. Every call and email adds weight. Visit the Stealth Bot Prohibition Act Resource Center for talking points, advocacy tools, and a social media toolkit to help you make the case: https://www.newsmediaalliance.org/digital-programs-and-advocacy/stealth-bot-prohibition-act-resource-center/
