After spending the last few years trying give way among the many, many robots that populate its platform, Twitter is finally trying to give some of them a chance. OThursday, the company announced would start testing the tags of some automated accounts, better known as Twitter bots—To let users explain which ones are useful and which ones need to go ahead.
When most of us hear the word “bot,” we’re probably thinking about the types of accounts meant to sow. politician discord or act amouths s for foreign governments, but there are countless robots on the platform for other purposes, too. There are bots that remind you of that drink water all day long, robots coming out surreal procedurally generated art, and of course CatBot 5000.
The problem with these projects, as we have seen in the pastIt’s that Twitter is known to apply its bot-beatdowns with a fairly broad brush, which means people’s therapy and art robots are being dragged along by those foreign actors. In 2018, dozens of popular art robots with tens of thousands of followers among them were razed in a massive ban on platforms that some creators have not yet fully recovered.
The good news is that this new label can help prevent another of these depletions from happening again. According to Twitter, a limited number of bot account owners are participating in an invitation-only test that will allow them to identify their bottled accounts with the new tag. On his blog post explaining the new tags, Twitter described the types of automated accounts we might see early on as robots that, for example, will help you find an appointment with the vaccine or alert you when a hurricane is near.
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“When these accounts inform you that they are automated, you will be able to better understand their purpose when you interact with them,” Twitter said. Hopefully in the future, this will not only include “useful” robots, but those that offer a strange and wonderful disconnect from the typical harmful platform hell.