Twitter: using automatic accounts

After spending the last few years trying withdraw with the many bots populating its platform, Twitter is finally trying to give some of them a shot. OThursday company announced it will start testing shortcuts for some automated accounts, better known as Twitter bots– let users figure out which ones are useful and which ones should be put aside.

When most of us hear the word “bot”, we are probably thinking about the types of accounts that should be sowing. political discord or actmouthpieces for foreign governmentsbut there is countless bots on the platform and for other purposes. There is bots that remind you drink water bots that twist surreal during the day procedurally generated art, and of course CatBot 5000…

The problem with these projects is as we saw in past– Twitter is known to use its bots with a fairly wide brush, which means that therapists and art bots are addicted to these foreign actors. In 2018, dozens of popular art bots with tens of thousands of subscribers in between were captured massive platform ban from which some creators still have not recovered.

The good news is that this new label could help prevent another of these annihilations from happening again. According to Twitter, a limited number of bot account holders participate in an invitation-only test that will allow them to identify their accounts with bots with the new label. In his Blog post Explaining the new shortcuts, Twitter described the types of automated accounts we might see early on, like bots that, say, help you find an appointment with a vaccine, or bots that alert you when a hurricane might be around.

“When these accounts tell you that they are automated, you better understand their purpose as you interact with them,” Twitter said. Hopefully, in the future, this will include not only “useful” bots, but also ones that offer strange, wonderful respite from the typical poisonous platform hell.