Lots of Bots on Twitter

I'm in Daegu, Korea, for this year's AoIR conference. The first paper session I'm in starts with Amy Johnson, who notes that existence on Twitter is manifested by voice – and voice is understood as the linguistic construction of social personae. Popularly, social media platforms are also described as giving people a voice, though this view is heavily disputed.

On Twitter, anyone with an email address and the technological literacy can have a voice, so from that perspective it is a surprisingly permissive environment – people, groups, bots, group of bots can all have a voice, and this makes Twitter a post-human and post-individual space.

There is a long history of research into the imagined and imaginary nature of participation, participants, and communities, of course – from Anderson to Appadurai and beyond. Amy's focus is on Twitter bot accounts as technical objects, especially also because Twitter explicitly allows and embraces such bot accounts.

There are therefore lots of bots on Twitter, and some of these technical accounts voice other objects. There are even a number of Twitter lists that bring together these bots – and how these lists are named (and thus framed) is fascinating in its own right: some of them refer to these bots 'people', 'folks', and in other human terms, in fact.

One of these bots is the @big_ben_clock, whose tweets simply say "BONG BONG BONG" as appropriate to the current time in London – so this is not simply giving the time, but providing a voice to the clock. Several similar accounts (in German, French, Korean, Ukrainian, ...) also exist. Some such accounts are pure bots, some are run by humans, some provide a combination of automated and manual tweets. Many are widely followed and frequently retweeted.

Another example are the bots representing everyday objects such as vacuum cleaners, toasters, and washing machines, some of which are quite foul-mouthed or confrontational; yet others engage in membership alignment related to specific locations (such as the San Francisco Bay Bridge account) or Internet memes (such as 17A, the account for Edward Snowden's presumptive airline seat from Moscow to Havana).

Finally, there are accounts that are modulations of pre-existing entities and objects, such as the Drunk Predator Drone, the Self-Aware Roomba, or the NASA Bi-Curiosity Rover accounts. The voices of these accounts are often modelled at least somewhat on the voices of any official accounts they are based on.

Finally, there are bots parodying bots - such as the Go For It Bot which builds on the New York Times' baseball analysis bot...