Twitter Wants You to Build a Bot. So I Did
For all the controversy about bots on Twitter, stoked most recently by Elon Musk’s aborted acquisition plans, it would seem reasonable to expect the company to close access to the platform and shy away from automation. Twitter Inc. is doing just the opposite, instead encouraging people to tap into its vast and open repository of data and build software around it.
In fact, it has a tutorial online — How to create a Twitter bot with v2 of the Twitter API — that walks you through the process step by step. So that’s what Bloomberg Opinion did. We successfully ran an automated account that retweeted trends, garnered a few dozen followers, and attracted thousands of visitors. This is what we learned about the process, and how interaction works on Twitter when an automated system is in charge.
Musk’s assertion that there’s far more bots on the system than Twitter has disclosed (it claims the figure is less than 5%) prompted the billionaire last week to call off his planned $44 billion takeover. The company has denied the allegation and said it will fight to have the acquisition enforced.
While Twitter was aware of our bot (I told them), the company wasn’t involved in the process nor was it given the account’s handle. The goal was to mimic how a spammer might set up a bot to spread misinformation or promote cryptocurrencies, two of the most common and unwanted uses of the platform.
The jargon can seem a bit scary to the uninitiated. Bot is a word that tends to elicit strong feelings. Yet it simply means a system that runs with some degree of automation — they’re neither good nor evil. API stands for application programming interface and functions as a guide map for accessing information on users, tweets, images and a lot of
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