Bots have long been a character on the Twitter landscape. In fact, they are so popular that many users use them to download content, to create reminders and even to get on Elon Musk's nerves. Yes, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX has a serious problem with a bot that is constantly monitoring the movements of his plane.
Given the exponential growth of bots and automations on Twitter, the company wants to make it easier for the user which accounts are, precisely, bots, given the difficulty on some occasions to distinguish between an automatic account and a legitimate one. Of course, it is not something, forgive the redundancy, automatic.
As Twitter announced last September, users have the ability to tag automated accounts they own. The idea? That the rest of the community can identify them in a simple way.
In fact, according to Twitter, the pilot test that began last year has been a success, so the social network has decided to open this functionality to all users. So that any account can add a tag to their profile to self-identify as an automated account.
Now it will be easier to know which accounts on Twitter are actually 'bots'
According to the company, the reason behind the inclusion of this new label is to help differentiate automated accounts from those managed by humans, offering greater transparency within the platform. In addition, it will not only be a label, like those of verified accounts to differentiate automated ones. It will also include additional information about the bot.
Be careful because this additional information, focused on increasing confidence in these automated accounts, will not be applied equally. The company wants what it calls good bots to have more visibility, to the detriment of bad automated accounts. And what is a good bot? According to Twitter those who share useful or relevant information and have the intention of genuinely improving the user experience.
In addition to user bots, Twitter also highlights that this new label can also help identify institutional automated accounts, such as customer service. In this case chatbots stand out such as @CercaniasAvisos or @AvisosRodalies.
Be that as it may, the new labels to identify bots become available today for all users who want to apply them to automated accounts.
