The Bot Registration Act of 2017 Could Improve Twitter For Us Humans
This sounds like an X-Men storyline, but Twitter needs to ask all bot accounts to register as such & then badge. Bots can be very useful but users should know they’re following a bot & bots should follow certain ToS. Treat bots like a developer ecosystem, not like user accounts.
Twitter hasn’t been able to effectively police their bot ecosystem — I don’t know if it’s will (desire) or way (ability, prioritization) — but it seems that they’d want to understand what percentage of their activity is machine-driven versus accounts piloted by actual human beings. The company’s policy lead published some general “we take bots seriously”thoughts earlier this summer but the post doesn’t clarify whether Twitter believes bots should be identified in a consistent user-facing manner. One of my favorite Bot-ologists, Renee DiResta, also recently suggested that bot accounts be labeled with a robot emoji, or some similar demarcation in the name or bio. (In that article Renee also distinguished between Bots and Cyborgs, both automated accounts but where the latter spoofs human behavior).
So want to follow a bot which tweets whenever NYTimes Maggie Haberman publishes a new article? Awesome. Whenever USGS detects a big earthquake? Yes! Which combines two current news events into a single headline? I don’t, but you do you. These and many more wonders exist on Twitter, but without a Bot designation and Bot directory, who knows what the average user assumes. It also gives Twitter license to shut down Bots which don’t register and more easily monitor account behaviors. As it stands, who knows what percentage of Twitter accounts are bots and what impact these bots are having on user experience. Well, I guess we’re incrementally answering this question without Twitter’s help….
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International Swagger Ent.
7 年https://soundcloud.com/hoodrich-3/hoodrich-lord
Director of Technology at Simple Machines Pty Ltd
7 年Ok so let say that some bot decided not to register (bad bot). How would they know? If the answer is that they have algorithms (Turing test anybody?) to determine if the account is a bot or not then why would they require registration? Somebody didn't think this through ...
Cake designer at The Palms Bakery
7 年Daniel Sheard
Founder / Chief Investment Officer @ Dhruva Fund | Fund Management
7 年Interesting Ideas! However, while there is mild benefit for the user to know if some account is a bot or not, why would a nefarious actor register as a bot? Won't those bots just get better at pretending to be human? Creating a bot directory is perhaps useful, if someone is looking to ADD more content to follow. However, the big problem with twitter is staying abreast of the content one follows, have an idea about top current events/discussions (top content), and dealing with personal abuse/harassment. Adding a bot registration initiative is cool, but relatively low impact in my opinion.
vote for to improve more twitter.