Saturday, September 12, 2015

You Might be a Twitter Bot if...

1. Your username has a random string of numbers at the end, that humans would be unlikely to remember.

2. Your profile description is a list of general descriptions with no specific information or location. (And stars in between phrases; what's that all about?)

3. Your profile description is supposed to be "whimsical" but actually sounds like it was written by a machine who had heard of humans but never actually met one. ("Award-winning" what, Jennifer? "Recovering youth worker"? Ew.)

4. Your profile picture is a stock photo found on the web and multiple other Twitter accounts. (Do a Google Image search to check this.)



5. Your tweets are a series of random, non-sensical phrases or ads.




6. Nobody is starring, retweeting, or replying to your tweets.

7. Your tweets can be found verbatim in Wikipedia or dozens of other tweets, but none are re-tweets or replies. (To check this, copy the text of the tweet and paste it in to a Google search. Put quotes around it, to search for the entire phrase verbatim, then click "Search".)



Addendum: What can you do if you are followed by a Twitter Bot? Please report them for spam and do not follow back. It's a small thing to do, but if enough of us do it, we may have an impact.

P.S. This is just the most recent manifestation of Twitter Bots. Click here to read about a previous one.

P.P.S Got another Bot follower literally while I was writing this post: