A Twitterbot is a bot program used to produce automated posts on the Twitter microblogging service, or to automatically follow Twitter users. Twitterbots come in various forms. For example, many serve as spam, enticing clicks on promotional links. Others post @replies or automatically "retweet" in response to tweets that include a certain word or phrase. These automatic tweets are often seen as fun or silly. Some Twitter users even program Twitterbots to assist themselves with scheduling or reminders.
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Features
It is sometimes desirable to identify when a Twitter account is controlled by a bot. In a 2012 paper, Chu et al. propose the following criteria that indicate that an account may be a bot (they were designing an automated system):
Examples
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. Here are examples of some of the Twitterbots and how they interact with users on Twitter.
@assbott is a bot that tweeted Donald Trump and was often the first reply. When replied to, Assbott tweets random phrases at people leading some to believe he was making a conversation with them.
@DBZNappa replied with "WHAT!? NINE THOUSAND?" to anyone on Twitter that used the internet meme phrase "over 9000". The account began in 2011, and was eventually suspended in 2015, mostly likely a victim of its own success.
@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.
@choose_this sends at-replies to Twitter users who tweet about making a choice between a wide variety of things.
@CongressEdits and @parliamentedits posts whenever someone makes edits to Wikipedia from the US Congress and UK Parliament IP addresses, respectively.
@DearAssistant sends auto-reply tweets responding to complex queries in simple English by utilizing Wolfram Alpha.
@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.
@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.
@EarthquakesSF tweets about earthquakes in the San Francisco Bay Area as they happen using real-time seismographic information from the USGS.
@everyword has tweeted every word of the English language. It started in 2008 and tweeted every thirty minutes until 2014.
@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.
@Horse ebooks is a bot that has gained a following among people who found its tweets poetic. 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.
@KookyScrit sends auto-reply tweets correcting misspellings of the word "weird".
@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.
@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.
@RedScareBot tweets in the persona of Joseph McCarthy in response to Twitter posts mentioning "socialist", "communist", or "communism".
@Tauntbot replies to anyone who mentions it with a randomly generated, verbose insult. It also periodically tweets random taunts at nobody in particular.
@tinycarebot promotes simple self care actions to its followers, such as remembering to look up from your screens, taking a break to go outside, and drink more water. It will also send a self care suggestion if you tweet directly at it.
@Wikipediafinds "tweets dozens of things that could have their own Wikipedia article if our consciousness could catalogue them", according to Paste Magazine. It 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.