I must confess when I first heard the term micro-blogging back in 2008 from my tech-obsessed husband, I scoffed at it.  “It’ll never catch on,” I confidently pronounced. I seem to remember making similar predictions about the success of Take That back in the early 1990s.

So with a feeling of eating humble pie, I created my own twitter account and started to become acquainted with the app and some of the recommended twitterbots.

Initially, I was totally sucked into the novelty factor.  Discovering Pentametron and learning about iambic pentameter (my formal studies of the English language ceased post GCSE in 1993) was a revelation.  This is a Shakespeare-inspired algorithm that searches twitter, looking for tweets that happen to be in iambic pentameter.  It’s like panning for gold in the word soup of the twittersphere. It then retweets the lines in pairs to form a rhyming couplet.   

I also discovered the sinister side of twitterbots. The social media manipulation of South African politics was something I was aware of but did not fully understand.  The article which I have linked to is an opinion piece by the Premier of the province where I live and former leader of the opposition party here in South Africa.  In this instance, twitterbots were used to create a network that disseminated fake news and posts that pushed a pro-government agenda.

Thankfully there are also bots like @RuGovEdits which monitors and publicises anonymous edits to Wikipedia pages from Russian government IP addresses.   It is reassuring to know that programmers are also creating bots that seek out governmental interference across the internet. 

I shall wrap things up with a retweet from Pentametron:

My Twitter isn’t working like before…

I’m broken pieces shattered on the floor

 

 

Jan 23, 2019