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):

Examples of Twitterbots

This is a dynamic list and 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.

@StupidCounter has been tweeting consecutive numbers in word form every two minutes since April 2009. [9]

@99Crushes re-Tweets a user when they use a hashtag such as #WCW (Woman Crush Wednesday) and announces that the user has a "crush" even when the Tweet in question isn't making reference to that particular context of the acronym. For instance, a Tweet using #WCW but making reference to World Championship Wrestling.

@aortic_pumps replaces every word in news stories with synonyms, in the style of Joey from Friends

@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]

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

@choose_this sends at-replies to Twitter users who tweet about making a choice between a wide variety of things.[11]

@CongressEdits and @parliamentedits posts whenever someone makes edits to Wikipedia from the US Congress and UK Parliament IP addresses, respectively.[12]

@DearAssistant sends auto-reply tweets responding to complex queries in simple English by utilizing Wolfram Alpha.[13]

@dotcottonbible posts bible verses as a comment on trending topics, in the style of Eastenders character Dot Cotton.

@DroptheIBot tweets the message, "People aren't illegal. Try saying ‘undocumented immigrant’ or ‘unauthorized immigrant’ instead" to Twitter users who have sent a tweet containing the phrase ‘illegal immigrant’. It was created by American Fusion.net journalists Jorge Rivas and Patrick Hogan.[14]

@EarthquakesSF tweets about earthquakes in the San Francisco Bay Area as they happen using real-time seismographic information from the USGS.[15]

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

@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.[16]

@Horse_ebooks is a bot that has gained a following among people who found its tweets poetic.[17]

@KookyScrit sends auto-reply tweets correcting misspellings of the word "weird."[18]

@MetaphorMagnet is an AI bot that generates metaphorical insights using its knowledge-base of stereotypical properties and norms. A companion bot @MetaphorMirror pairs these metaphors to news tweets. Another companion bot @BestOfBotWorlds uses metaphor to generate faux-religious insights.[19]

@NixieBot finds tweets with the hashtag #NixieBotShowMe, shows text found in that tweet on its vintage neon B7971 Nixie tube Fourteen-segment display then takes a picture of the display and sends it back to the author of the tweet. It can also serve up oracular answers in the form of Oblique Strategies or "Eight ball" answers. It has full instructions on its Tumblr page: http://nixiebot.tumblr.com [20]

@Pentametron finds tweets incidentally written in iambic pentameter using the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, pairs them into couplets using a rhyming dictionary, and retweets them as couplets into followers' feeds.[21]

@PleaseRapAbout sends auto-reply tweets made by Rap Genius lyrics, based on the word sent to it.

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

@ShizSnoopSpits tweets direct messages as well as random famous quotes in the vernacular of Snoop Dogg.

@Tauntbot replies to anyone who mentions it with a randomly generated, verbose insult. It also periodically tweets random taunts at nobody in particular.[22]

@WetherX is a bot that responds to people who confuse wether and whether in their tweets.[23]

@Wikipediafinds Is run by Ayako S. A mysterious girl, and former lover of Dylan Anaya, who ran @Wikifinds (which was banned by Twitter and Wikipedia.) She claims to live alone under constant surveillance by the police somewhere in South Korea.[24]

@fujinamiushio Japanese 1st year student bot, repeats a set number of child like tweets in the Japanese language.

@kt_boundaryless Generates random views on trending topics in the style of controversial commentator Katie Hopkins.

@digitalsofia is similar to @BotTellMe and @DearAssistant but is written in Node.js. It tweets a new word a day with its meaning and part of speech and periodically retweets the latest tweet with the hashtag #technology and #design.

@AlliterationBot retweets statuses with alliteration. [25]

@DeepDrumpf is a recurrent neural network, created at MIT, that releases tweets imitating Donald Trump's speech patterns. It received its namesake from the term 'Donald Drumpf', popularized in the segment 'Donald Trump' from the show Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.[26]

@trutherbot was an anarchist political activist account advocating for pacifism, free market, environmentalism, deism, anti-feminism, anti-gun control, climate change denial, conspiracy theories, and several other topics. The account was banned by Twitter, however the account has since resurrected in the form of numerous, color-coded bots.[27]

@lisgrievances Is a bot that responds to direct messages by posting them anonymously after scrubbing the sender's name. The bot was originally intended to help those working in the Library Science field express the frustrations they felt during their daily work. [28]

References

  1. ↑ Jason Kincaid (January 22, 2010). "All Your Twitter Bot Needs Is Love". TechCrunch. Retrieved May 31, 2012.
  2. ↑ Kashmir Hill (August 9, 2012). "The Invasion of the Twitter Bots". Forbes. Retrieved December 28, 2012.
  3. 1 2 Dubbin, Rob. "The Rise of Twitter Bots". The New Yorker. Retrieved 9 March 2014.
  4. 1 2 Martin Bryant (August 11, 2009). "12 weird and wonderful Twitter Retweet Bots". TNW. Retrieved August 1, 2014.
  5. 1 2 3 Christine Erickson (July 22, 2012). "Don't Block These 10 Hilarious Twitter Bots". Mashable. Retrieved December 28, 2012.
  6. ↑ David Daw (October 23, 2011). "10 Twitter Bot Services to Simplify Your Life". PCWorld. Retrieved May 31, 2012.
  7. ↑ Chu, Zi; Gianvecchio, Steven; Wang, Haining; Jajodia, Sushil (2012). "Detecting Automation of Twitter Accounts: Are You a Human, Bot, or Cyborg?" (PDF). IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (IEEE) 9 (6). doi:10.1109/TDSC.2012.75. ISSN 1545-5971. Retrieved 1 August 2014.
  8. ↑ Cashmore, Pete. "Twitter Zombies: 24% of Tweets Created by Bots". Retrieved 19 March 2014.
  9. ↑ "StupidCounter FanFic". "StupidCounter Song".
  10. ↑ "Twitter Chatbot by Program O". Program O. Retrieved 8 August 2013.
  11. ↑ Gallagher, Brenden. "The 25 Most Ridiculous Twitterbots". ComplexTech. Retrieved 16 March 2014.
  12. ↑ Mosendz, Polly. "Congressional IP Address Blocked from Making Edits to Wikipedia". Retrieved 1 August 2014.
  13. ↑ Protalinski, Emil. "Dear Assistant: A Twitter bot that uses Wolfram Alpha to answer your burning questions". The Next Web, Inc. Retrieved 1 August 2014.
  14. ↑ Judah, Sam; Ajala, Hannah (3 August 2015). "The Twitter bot that 'corrects' people who say 'illegal immigrant'". BBC Online. Retrieved 3 August 2015.
  15. ↑ "100 Best Earthquake Twitter Bots".
  16. ↑ Farrier, John. "Twitter Bot Pranks Gullible People with Hilariously Fake Facts". NeatoCMS. Retrieved 16 March 2014.
  17. ↑ Adrian Chen (23 February 2012). "How I Found the Human Being Behind Horse_ebooks, The Internet’s Favorite Spambot". Gawker. Retrieved 4 May 2012.
  18. ↑ "Rise of the Twitterbot: A Modern Language App for Good and Evil". Listen & Learn. Retrieved 1 August 2014.
  19. ↑ Veale, Tony (2015). Game of Tropes: : Exploring the Placebo Effect in Computational Creativity. (PDF). ICCC-2015: Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Computational Creativity. Park City, Utah.
  20. ↑ https://botwiki.org/bots/twitterbots/NixieBot/
  21. ↑ Max Read (30 April 2012). "Weird Internets: The Amazing Found-on-Twitter Sonnets of Pentametron". Gawker. Retrieved 9 March 2016.
  22. ↑ "This is @tauntbot, a Twitter bot that will mercilessly insult you". Fusion. Retrieved 2015-10-22.
  23. ↑ "Wether Or Not".
  24. ↑ "10 Weird Twitter Beings Worth a Follow". pastemagazine.com.
  25. ↑ "AlliterationBot on Twitter".
  26. ↑ Bonnie Burton (4 March 2016). "Drumpf Twitterbot learns to imitate Trump via deep-learning algorithm". CNET. CBS Interactive. Retrieved 4 March 2016.
  27. ↑ https://www.trutherbot.com
  28. ↑ "LIS Grievances".
This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Thursday, April 28, 2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.