A Brief Survey of Journalistic Twitter Bot Projects
In our collaborative op-ed for Sam Woolley’s provocateur-in-residence workshop at Data & Society, How to Think About Bots, we briefly surveyed the role bots can play in journalism. As we said in our op-ed, “Bots can be useful for making value systems apparent, revealing obfuscated information, and amplifying the visibility of marginalized topics or communities.” For my provocation, I wanted to explore Twitter bots as an alternative to the article page, able to tell a story that exists only in social media feeds, as opposed to publications’ websites.
Below you’ll find a brief survey of notable recent journalistic bot projects, most of which are political in nature. Some of these projects are by journalists, but others are by technologists, designers, and activists. Very few newsrooms have experimented with these kinds of social media bots. My hope is that this provocation inspires more of them to explore social media bots as an option in the future.
@congressedits / @NYPDedits
@congressedits is a watchdog bot by Ed Summers that tweets changes made to Wikipedia articles from IP addresses in the United States Congress. John Emerson’s @NYPDedits works the same way as @congressedits, drawing from edits made from IP addresses in the NYPD. Both hold those in power accountable for the things they do in secret.
@scotus_servo
V David Zvenyach’s @scotus_servo tracks changes to SCOTUS opinions. The bot publicizes these changes to SCOTUS opinions, which the court itself does not publicize. Journalists, scholars, and lawyers can use this data to track changes on SCOTUS voting patterns or attempt to deduce other patterns with it.
@FISAcourt
@FISAcourt, by Eric Mill, tweets updates from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court docket. Mill on why he created @FISAcourt: “Given how fervently the Court wants to be seen as in service of the public and not the executive, it’s absurd that the FISA Court’s door should stand nameless and undocumented in a public hallway. On top of that, there’s no obvious way for the public to interact with even the Court’s unclassified work….The Court invented their public docket on the fly back in June, and I’m very glad it exists, but from a public records standpoint, it’s a mess.” So this bot can be considered a public service.
@stopandfrisk
@stopandfrisk, by developer Simon Lawrence and journalist Michele Lent Hirsch, pulls from NYCPL data to send a tweet for each of the 685,724 people stopped in New York in 2011. Each tweet includes the date, the age of the person stopped, the borough the incident occurred in, the reason cited by the NYPD, and whether a weapon was found. As the bot’s creators explained to Mashable, “The idea was to bring a more human face to the raw stats and to put information out there that people may not be as familiar with — like the reason NYPD stopped people [might be] wearing clothes commonly used in a crime. What are clothes commonly worn in a crime? … People think, ‘Oh, they stopped 600 people, that’s bad’ — but when you’re seeing they stopped a 12-year-old using force or something like that, that humanizes it a little bit.”
@EarthquakeBot / Quakebot
Bill Snitzer’s @EarthquakeBot draws on USGS data to tweet the details of any earthquakes 5.0 or greater as they occur. Quakebot is a project of LA Times that produces stories about earthquakes faster than humans can write them. It works by pulling data from USGS and filling it into a pre-written template. These projects operate as flash alerts for public safety.
@NSA_PRISMbot
Created by Mark Sample, @NSA_PRISMbot is an “experiment in speculative surveillance, imagining the kind of useless information the NSA might distill from its invasive data-gathering.” The bot tweets hypothetical data points that the NSA might sweep up in its mass surveillance efforts, i.e. “Dorian Lesch of East Erich, Virginia searched for ‘sundried’ on Yahoo!”
@clearcongress
Zack Whalen’s @clearcongress tweets redacted versions of tweets by members of Congress, with the length of the redaction determined by congressional approval rate (provided by HuffPost Data). Mark Sample examines the significance of @clearcongress in his essay on protest bots: “Despite not saying anything legible, @ClearCongress has something to say. It’s an oppositional bot, thematizing the disconnect between the will of the people and the rulers of the land. At the same time, the bot suggests that Congress has replaced substance with white noise, that all senators and representatives end up sounding the same, regardless of their politics, and that, most damning of all, Congress is ineffectual, all but useless.”
@CensusAmericans
@CensusAmericans, by Jia Zhang for FiveThirtyEight, uses data from the U.S. Census Bureau between 2009 and 2013 to create short biographies of anonymous Americans. Zhang on her motivation for the project: “Census data is often seen at a large scale — atlases, research studies and interactive visualizations all offer the view from 10,000 feet. But there are people inside those top-line numbers. And when you start to look at the people in the data sets, you get a glimpse of their lives. Just a few descriptors — how much they work, whom they take care of, where they were born — can give us a sense of the people around us.”
@droptheibot
Drop the I Bot is a project of Fusion, created by journalists Patrick Hogan and Jorge Rivas. The bot tweeted at people who say “illegal immigrant” to explain why the phrase is offensive, and educated those sending ignorant tweets into the world by offering alternative descriptors: “People aren’t illegal. Try saying ‘undocumented immigrant’ or ‘unauthorized immigrant’ instead.” @droptheibot has been suspended, likely because of Twitter’s rules regarding spam.
@staywokebot
@staywokebot was made by Darius Kazemi in collaboration with activist DeRay Mckesson “to save activists time” by providing answers to 101-level questions about race and social justice that prominent activists get asked over and over again. Kazemi handed the bot off to We the Protestors, and it now compares followers to black cultural and political leaders and sends them encouraging messages and compliments. (Read more about future plans for the bot.)
Points/talking bots: “A Brief Survey of Journalistic Twitter Bot Projects” is an output of a weeklong workshop at Data & Society that was led by “Provocateur-in-Residence” Sam Woolley and brought together a group of experts to get a better grip on the questions that bots raise. More posts from workshop participants talking bots:
- How to Think About Bots by Samuel Woolley, danah boyd, Meredith Broussard, Madeleine Elish, Lainna Fader, Tim Hwang, Alexis Lloyd, Gilad Lotan, Luis Daniel Palacios, Allison Parrish, Gilad Rosner, Saiph Savage, and Samantha Shorey
- What is it like to be a bot? by Samantha Shorey
- Activist Bots: Helpful But Missing Human Love? by Saiph Savage
- Bots: A definition and some historical threads by Allison Parrish
- Our friends, the bots? by Alexis Lloyd
- On Paying Attention: How to Think about Bots as Social Actors by Madeleine Elish
- What is the Value of a Bot? by danah boyd
- Rise of the Peñabots by Luis Daniel Palacios
