Twitter adopts automated accounts

After spending the last few years trying to inaugurate the many, many bots that populate its platform, Twitter is finally trying to give some of them a chance. On Thursday, the company announcement he would start testing labels for some automated accounts, better known as Twitter robots– to allow users to determine which are useful and which should be discarded.

When most of us hear the word “bot,” we probably think of the types of accounts meant to seed. Politics discord or act as mouthpieces for foreign governments, but there is countless robots on the platform for other purposes as well. There are robots that remind you to Drink water throughout the day, bots that turn surreal procedurally generated art, and of course, CatBot 5000.

The problem with these projects, as we saw in the past– is that Twitter is known to apply its bot-beatdowns with a fairly broad brush, which means that people’s therapy and artistic bots are being swept away by these foreign actors. In 2018, dozens of folk art bots with tens of thousands of followers among them were swept away in a massive platform ban some creators still haven’t fully recovered.

The good news is that this new tag could help prevent another such erasure from happening again. According to Twitter, a limited number of bot account owners are participating in an invite-only test that will allow them to identify their bot accounts with the new tag. In his blog post Explaining the new labels, Twitter described the types of automated accounts we might initially see as bots that, for example, help you find an appointment for a vaccine, or bots that alert you when a hurricane might happen. be nearby.

“When these accounts let you know they’re automated, you get a better understanding of their purpose when you interact with them,” Twitter said. Hopefully, in the future, this will not just include “useful” bots, but those that offer a weird and wonderful respite from the platform-typical harmful hell.