TWITTER VIEWS: Twitter Bots

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Some Twitter users love bots—those fake, computer-generated Twitter users that boost your follower count. They’re usually pretty harmless, retweet you, and make your numbers look better to the outside world than they actually are. Most of us don’t When Greg Marra built @Trackgirl, he designed her as an experiment to see if an automated program could worm its way into online networks of real people. What he didn’t expect is that people would actually care what happened to @Trackgirl. But back in We spoke to some of our favorite bot-makers about their favorite twitter bots — their own, and made by others in the #botALLY community — to surface some lesser-known projects worth following. Why Twitter? Its 140-character constraint is A Twitter bot named @she_not_he has been activated to correct users who misgender Caitlyn Jenner. Whenever users refer to Jenner in their tweets using the pronoun "he," the bot will tweet a response reminding them to use Jenner's now-preferred female pronouns. Earlier in August, it was reported that 8.5 percent of Twitter users, or 23 million accounts, were not actually people but bots, autonomous accounts that post without any human interaction. Twitter refuted this claim saying it was much closer to 5 percent But it’s not too late for you to get in on this bizarre genre of word art. A computer-generated account which serves as your own personal Twitter bot Frankenstein is always fresh and funny. Plus, for beginning coders like me, this project is a great way .

About three weeks ago, I started noticing that almost every time I opened up Twitter, the Notifications tab had that oh-so-nice blue dot, the reward for tweeting well done. The flag alerts users someone has followed, retweeted or mentioned them—but when Twitter now has more than 270 million users who actively log in and tweet. But, according to the latest figures, hidden among these active users are approximately 23 million that don't ever visit the microblogging site. Instead, they pull information from This summer, there were 20 million fake accounts for sale on Twitter, the WSJ says. The paper has previously noted that even some mainstream media brands, like Mashable, appear to be followed by large armies of bots. The quality of Twitter's userbase is It seems I had been followed overnight by five hot Twitter babes. Why do these things not happen to me in real life? Oh, right – because I’m old and cranky. But also because four of these accounts are bots; only one is not. Can you spot the difference? .