Twitterbot

A Twitterbot is a program used to produce automated posts on the Twitter microblogging service, or to automatically follow Twitter users.^[1][2] Twitterbots come in various forms. For example, many serve as spam, enticing clicks on promotional links.^[3] Others post @replies or automatically "retweet"^[4] in response to tweets that include a certain word or phrase. These automatic tweets are often seen as fun or silly.^[4][5] Some Twitter users even program Twitterbots to assist themselves with scheduling or reminders.^[6]

Features of a Twitterbot

It is sometimes desirable to identify when a Twitter account is controlled by a bot. In a 2012 paper,^[7] Chu et al. propose the following criteria that indicate that an account may be a bot (they were designing an automated system):

• "Periodic and regular timing" of tweets;
• Whether the tweet content contains known spam; and
• The ratio of tweets from mobile versus desktop, as compared to an average human Twitter user.

Examples of Twitterbots

This is an incomplete list that may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness. You can help by expanding it with reliably sourced entries.

There are many different types of Twitterbots and their purposes vary from one to another. Some bots may tweet helpful material such as @EarthquakesSF (description below). In total, Twitterbots are estimated to create approximately 24% of tweets that are on Twitter.^[8] Here are examples of some of the Twitterbots and how they interact with users on Twitter.

@wikifinds was created by Dylan Anaya to explore ideas of text based galleries and post-post- internet art.

@factbot1 was created by Eric Drass to illustrate what he believed to be a prevalent problem: that of people on the internet believing unsupported facts which accompany pictures.^[9]

@chatmundo is an AI conversational Twitter bot based on Program O which responds to @chatmundo mentions.^[10]

@WBEZbot Tweets the current programming on NPR's Chicago affiliate station, WBEZ.

@Horse_ebooks is a commercial Twitter bot that has gained a following among people who find its tweets poetic.^[11]

• It has inspired various _ebooks-suffixed Twitter bots which use Markov text generators (or similar techniques) to create new tweets by mashing up the tweets of their owner.

@EarthquakesSF tweets about earthquakes in the San Francisco Bay Area as they happen using real-time seismographic information from the USGS.^[12]

@Betelgeuse_3 sends at-replies in response to tweets that include the phrase, "Beetlejuice, beetlejuice, beetlejuice." The tweets are sent in the voice of the lead character from the Beetlejuice film.^[5]

@RedScareBot tweets in the persona of Joseph McCarthy in response to Twitter posts mentioning "socialist," "communist," or "communism."^[5]

@KookyScrit sends auto-reply tweets correcting misspellings of the word "weird."^[13]

@everyword has tweeted every word of the English language. It started in 2008 and tweeted every thirty minutes until 2014.^[3]

@DearAssistant sends auto-reply tweets responding to complex queries in simple English by utilizing Wolfram Alpha.^[14]

@BotTellMe is much like @DearAssistant but is written in Python and uses DuckDuckGo for better search results for questions Wolfram Alpha cannot answer.

@WetherX is a bot that responds to people who confuse wether and whether in their tweets.

@choose_this sends at-replies to Twitter users who tweet about making a choice between a wide variety of things ^[15]

@CongressEdits and @parliamentedits posts whenever someone makes edits to Wikipedia from the US Congress and UK Parliament IP addresses, respectively.^[16]

@StupidCounter has been tweeting consecutive numbers in word form every two minutes since April 2009.

@JstBelowTweetz has been tweeting "the person below" tweets repeatedly at random times. The average amount sent in a day is said to be 10.

@wiseman_quoting responds to news feed with an appropriate and witty quote.

@LetKanyeFinish completes a tweeted sentence in the style of Kanye West.

@ExplainHashtag explains the meaning of a hashtag when asked. The answers are based on users telling the bot what they mean, with the most retweeted and favorited answers being chosen.

References