Roll your own Twitter bots are becoming increasingly popular, especially ones which look at the Tweets of their creator’s main feed, jumble the words up and spew forth stream of consciousness style missives. You may want to reconsider, however, because things seem to have gone a bit wrong in the land of Bots today:
The person above apparently coded a Bot and gave it to another Twitter user to fire out pearls of wisdom, and everything was fine until his Bot said something…peculiar (to another Bot! Did I mention Bots talk to Bots yet?)
Police saw the offending Tweet, and then this happened:
Once you load up your Bot and send it into the wilds of Twitter stuffed to the brim with words to reassemble, you have little control over what will be said. An additional twist is that the now deleted post wasn’t sent to law enforcement by a concerned Twitter user – they found it themselves:
Shopping Bots buying narcotics, vacuum cleaners indulging in late night snacks – it’ll be Dyson Spheres next. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go hide underground for a few hundred years.
No Bots allowed.
Christopher Boyd
