Twitter Cracking Down On Bots

I use Twitter a lot. I know it has a reputation for being full of garbage, but if you curate who you follow and use the right app, it can be extremely useful. Over time, I've noticed fewer garbage posts and that may be due to the work Twitter is doing to eliminate bots.

The Twitter blog has a long post about bots and Twitter that's worth reading if you're a Twitter user. 

“There are many bots on Twitter that do good things and that are helpful to people,” said Stewart. “We wanted to understand more about what those look like so we could help people identify them and feel more comfortable in their understanding of the space they’re in.”  

Stewart’s team revealed that people found content more trustworthy if they know more about who’s sharing it—starting with whether that account is human or automated. To help address the issue of bots, Twitter recently rolled out new labels that identify bots with an “automated” designation in their profile, an icon of a robot, and a link to the Twitter handle of the person who created the bot. “Not only are we just labeling these bots, we're also saying: this is the owner, and this is why they're here,” said Stewart. “Based on the preliminary research that we have, we hypothesize that that's going to create an environment where you can trust those bots a lot more.”  

So why go to the trouble of labeling bots, instead of banning them all from Twitter?

“It's not inherently wrong to have an automated account on Twitter; obviously automated accounts don't have to be terrible. There was a vaccine bot that was really popular in New York,” said Dante Clemons, the senior product manager tasked with creating and testing these labels. She was referring to the Turbovax bot that Tweeted vaccine appointments to its 160,000 followers. “I focused on those accounts because these are the ones that can help us all reframe how we think about bots.” 

You might also want to take a look at this thread from the Twitter Safety account that has some good tips about how to tell bots from real accounts.