The word “bot” has often been referred to as an adverse omen, but in every group of depraved personnel, there will be a decent one. Twitter for some time now introduced a conduit called label which gives way for “good bots” to identify themselves. This is because there have and will always be “good bots” on every social media platform but discovering and recognizing them has always been a problem. The labeling of these “good bots” has been in testing for a small group, but has now been made available to the public for all automated account holders. As the world has become a fast-moving one with every individual on the go each day, it should be known that we are being kept up to date by bots that give us life updates which can be seen in information such as COVID-19, earthquake alerts, bills being introduced in Congress, etc.
For an account on Twitter to be treated or made known as a “good bot”, it has to display the new bot labeling feature on its profile. Twitter identifies its users with their names and account names, but to distinguish between these and the “good bot”, a small robot icon will now appear next to the words “Automated by” which will then be followed by the name of the person who is operating the “good bot” for that bot account, and for more identification purposes, a detailed description of the Twitter bio will be displayed.
Just as any tweet sent out by individuals, the automated status of the bot will be visible to users’ timelines whenever a tweet is sent out by the bot. Knowing these accounts as “good bots” will now give human users the option to decide which account to follow, have an engagement with, and also trust (for a “good bot” and unfollow (provided following a “bad bot”).
People use different means such as IFTTT to tweet out information, but Twitter is unconcerned about that sort of tweet automation, this is because users of third party applications need to perform a full-scale investigation for the sort of integrations they make with these third-party applications as well as following the rules set by Twitter.
Although this labeling comes as a huge relief, it does not address the larger picture associated with bots on Twitter’s service. The bots referred to as the nuisance ones can be from a long range of issues such as promoting cryptocurrency schemes and even the ones that try to influence elections, haha. With the introduction of the “good bots,” individuals associated with these accounts can now promote themselves as the individuals behind them and vice versa. As the feature is fully available to accounts that have been automated on Twitter, there is no auditing of the system for now.
A Twitter spokesperson has indicated that “all accounts on Twitter are subject to the Twitter rules and with the labels being opt-in only, we will not be auditing accounts that choose to adopt it at this time and will rely on our reporting process should an account violate the Rules.”
