Twitter rewrites developer policy to better support research and ‘good’ bots
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
I also find fault with this statement from the article:
> Going forward, developers must specify if they’re operating a bot account, what the account is, and who is behind it. This way, explains Twitter, “it’s easier for everyone on Twitter to know what’s a bot – and what’s not.”
It may be known to Twitter who is and isn't a bot, but unless something has changed, there is no public facing way to know if an account is a bot. I have never understood this. Sites like Mastodon and Discord clearly label bot accounts, but Twitter has never done so. They are fine labeling accounts arbitrarily as 'verified', but not clearly identifying bots. This would be a great step forward if they want to redefine bot behavior on the site.
Literally every single “bot post” was posted by a real person. That person’s posts should not be segregated as a result of their client software.
Twitter is mainly about human-to-human connection, and that should be the presumption for any account one comes across. Other uses should be obvious, or at least declared.
I'm not sure how you separate them out entirely, I would assume that twitter knows though.
I believe the term is: masquerade.
Though mascaraed is technically correct, it just denotes wearing mascara and not to "mask" oneself as someone else.
No. The commercial in a loop is clearly recognized as such. Twitter is more like the difference between talking to the store manager on the phone and talking to a voice script on the phone which claims to be the store manager.
Good luck getting your problem resolved with the voice script. Some voice scripts are good enough that some people can't tell the difference between it. And that's arguably fine! If you can't tell the difference, then is there a problem?
But enter in the poor soul who can't get that voice script to go off script to solve that customer's problem. Or, nefariously, the voice script that can cause problems en masse because there isn't a human in the loop, or even if there is then the human simply doesn't understand that they're causing problems.
These rules make it easier for bot authors who aren't interested in astroturfing to declare themselves as such.
I think that's a feature, not a bug. Alts and pseudonymous speech are some of the most important speech.
I hope you mean the opposite? Twitter has long been an unreliable partner in the developer ecosystem.
> They have shown not themselves to be a reliable partner
The "not" there feels like it's in an ambiguous spot, but at least gives a faint connotation of the author's intent, which reads as you'd like it to.
If I’m wrong I’d love to learn from someone smarter than me.
Even google doesn’t scrape the entire web every day.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/12/26/573609499...
I think it might be feasible to scrape a subset: a single account or a few accounts at most. But even then, you're still fighting problems ranging from wonky HTML generated through JavaScript towards sudden, unannounced changes to the DOM structure. It's not a managed API after all.
Scraping doesn't really help when publishing tweets, either.
It got striked several times by Twitter because of "hate-speech". Yes, the words were unfiltered - of course. That's language. The longest strike lasted for 5 days. It goes without saying that I disputed every single strike to no avail.
I finally took the bot down.
So, yeah, in hindsight, I should have modified the corpus. But at that time, around 2017, I was pretty angry at how Twitter handled these strikes.
P.S.: The account is still online and has 775 followers. Maybe I should revive it in a more "harmless" way. It was fun.
I thought about rebuilding it as a website. It could also work if I‘d use the ”fediverse“.
Mhm, gets me thinking...
There is still no re-review process however. I have an original apps.twitter.com account and used the new development experience form with the first few weeks.
I essentially requested API access for personal projects and was denied with no substantive explanation.
There is a form to submit a platform request hidden away in the support area (literally, it's not even on the page that lists all of the contact forms) but having used it about five times over a number of years has led to no response.
I would like to be a developer, contributing to the ecosystem I've been a member of for just over 10 years but Twitter seems to make this exceedingly hard with no recourse available :(
I'm not sure what you mean - what choice do you have? You're either building a twitter bot, or you aren't and it doesn't matter?
Also this isn't much (if any?) of an API change, it's a policy change. And even then it doesn't look like it should negatively affect you unless you were doing something nefarious already.
Now that you mention it, a bot-oriented twitter clone might be interesting...
I can choose not to interact with their platform at all. I can also find other ways of interacting with them in other ways (scraping or headless browser automation).
> Also this isn't much (if any?) of an API change, it's a policy change. And even then it doesn't look like it should negatively affect you unless you were doing something nefarious already.
If you are investing time and effort into an endeavour (whatever it is) it helps to know whether ground is likely to disappear from under you.
Microsoft while many people don't like them have kept many ancient APIs working e.g. We have code from 2005 that still works with the latest .NET Runtime with rather minimal changes. This provides you with confidence that going forward you won't face a lot of churn.
Policies while they aren't APIs are important in that they are both clear, applied fairly and don't change on a whim. A lot of people are sceptical that Twitter will do any of those based on previous behaviour.
Being a “grammar nazi” used to be a thing on Reddit and I’m glad it died out.
(No, I don't go around correcting strangers' grammar, but only because I know that most people are a lot more insecure about learning that they're wrong about something.)
Another critique might simply be that while it is certainly useful to understand rules of grammar, it isn't worth derailing a conversation over.
Sure, but this is sort of begging the question. Bad grammar can subtly affect the effectiveness of communication in ways that sometimes aren't even explicitly clear to the participants. Grammatical rules don't exist (solely) because someone decided to be stuck up for no reason.
> Another critique might simply be that while it is certainly useful to understand rules of grammar, it isn't worth derailing a conversation over.
Sure, this roughly describes why I don't correct strangers in practice. But note that the "derailment" is just another side effect of the insecurity I describe, not an inherent quality of correcting grammar: when someone corrects my grammar, spelling, or diction, my reaction is "Thanks! <rest of comment back on topic>". I don't see how this is derailing at all.
The type of grammar that gets corrected is usually not bad to the point of causing misunderstandings. Simple things like "could care less", "would of", etc. Every once in a while there's a mistake that's so bad that it makes things ambiguous, but that's not common. And it's not what these annoying bots are replying to in any case.
> I don't see how this is derailing at all
These bots can devolve into linguistics discussion, etc, that's not related to the linked article or self text at all. And in reddit's case, there are "meta" bots that respond if people respond "bad bot" or "good bot" to a bot's response.
> Grammatical rules don't exist (solely) because someone decided to be stuck up for no reason
Grammatical guides existing does not mean advice is always welcome. I say guides because a lot of supposed rules are prescriptive opinions, and there's no arbitrator that can deem a rule to be "correct". English does not have a language council, unlike French or Korean.
I meant simply that changing the topic is a mild "derailment" so to speak simply by redirecting the attention of the readers away from the topic at hand.
You could block them.
> Being a “grammar nazi” used to be a thing on Reddit and I’m glad it died out.
It's a shame it died out. Just like lots of things on reddit. The good/fun/interesting things are gone, only stale propaganda and silly nonsense is left.
It's funny how some people think that something shouldn't exist because they personally don't like it. The entitlement and privilege.
> The good/fun/interesting things are gone, only stale propaganda and silly nonsense is left.
Did you mean, “are left”?
True. But I'm a rebel.
> Did you mean, “are left”?
Yes. Thank you for pointing that out. We need more of you helpful grammar nazis in this world.
As are the people you’re trying to correct.
Being a grammar nazi isn't good, fun, or interesting. It derails conversations, encourages know-it-alls, and the corrections are often not correct. /r/badlinguistics exists for a reason.
Giving native speakers unsolicited advice is annoying, even if one is correct.
> only stale propaganda and silly nonsense is left.
There are a lot of niche subreddits with great content. Filtering by keywords and a few power users makes for a better experience.
> You could block them.
I hate this argument. The fact that reddit has an API does not mean we should tolerate junk replies from bots. Blocking a bot only blocks it for me; that bot is still polluting discussions.
> The reply and mention functions are intended to make communication between Twitter users easier. Automating these actions to reach many users on an unsolicited basis is an abuse of the feature, and is not permitted. For example, sending automated replies to Tweets based on keyword searches alone is not permitted.
https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-autom...
And since it's nit-picking, it's worth noting that the "could/couldn't care less" thing isn't at all as clear-cut as you are making out.
In the early 1990s, the well-known Harvard professor and language writer Stephen Pinker argued that the way most people say “could care less”—the way they emphasize the words—implies they are being ironic or sarcastic along the lines of the Yiddish phrases like “I should be so lucky!” which typically means the speaker doesn’t really expect to be so lucky. Michael Quinion of the wonderful World Wide Words website makes the same argument.
and
Both Merriam-Webster and dictionary.com have weighed in and say “could care less” and “couldn’t care less” mean the same thing. Their reasoning is that both phrases are informal, English is often illogical, and people use the two phrases in the same way. “Could care less” has come to mean the same thing as “couldn’t care less.”
https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/could-ca...
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/%7Emyl/languagelog/archives/001182...
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001201.h...
This wasn't Twitter arbitrarily banning you, but people repeatedly reporting your tweets. The option is right there, and aptly called "Uses the reply function to spam".
"I could not care less" is a malapropism we should strive to avoid.
If you remove the tweets that are something the parent tweet didn't ask for comment on, there would be nothing left.
Correcting native speakers when they didn’t ask is obnoxious. Particularly from an automated bot.
But it only lasted about a day. Come on, who makes these rules? :P
Good times, when you come to remember them...and now that I do, that was also the first time I spun up an AWS instance. These sorts of fun and games are good for learning, but I do understand why platforms dislike them, especially once they go mainstream.
This is true of everything from IRS data to a startup's data. I worked at a company which shared data extensively with researchers. But we weren't idiots. We gave it to people we trusted. Not every clown claiming to be an independent researcher. That's just sensible.
Today, data is gold. Companies may give it to academic institutions for free, but that's mostly because they hope the academics will publish their work and cite to the original source data, effectively free marketing.
https://twitter.com/thehugfairy - Sends Twitter hugs. You sign up at hugfairy.com to tell it who to hug. This one get's a lot of use. The website has about 1,500 DAU.
https://twitter.com/smithsonianbot - A more recent one, which sends random photos from Smithsonian's Open Access collection.
Overall I'm glad to see Twitter clarifying their rules. I've had API keys revoked without warning, my accounts deactivated, etc. Twitter dev support is always nice and I've gotten the bots running again, but it would be great to know in advance how I can avoid getting shut down.
I get a final rejection after several rounds, but the very first time? Because of non-response? Ooof.
Luckily, this was just on my personal account, not for work.
https://twitter.com/search?q=twitter%20denied%20access%20API...
https://www.accuracast.com/news/social-media-7471/twitter-ba...
> In effect ad networks like ‘Sponsored Tweets’ and ‘Ad.ly’ will be discontinued.
https://thenextweb.com/twitter/2012/08/17/twitter-4/
> These changes effectively kill off the growth of the third-party client ecosystem as we know it.
This is bad for society.
Which is why Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn and all of them are actually publishers, akin to the Washington Times or Fox News, and don't (currently) deserve §230 protection.
Why should it? They built the firehose, they can build the valves. It's not reasonable to argue, "whoopsy, too hard to do now!" when moderation has been around for DECADES and which therefore they consciously decided not to implement anywhere along the line. Even if Zuckerberg was already in over his head by that point, Thiel knew about this stuff. So did Parker. FB pays smart people who know about this stuff, too, they're just presumably prevented from implementing it.
This really is "a steering wheel that doesn't fly off while you're driving" situation, but FB refuses to secure steering wheels until they can figure out a way to do it without humans.
It's their problem if blacklists don't work. Why can't (can't) they use whitelists if that's the sure-fire solution? They can, they just don't want to. Look how many teeth had to be pulled just to get attribution on ads that were proven to be problematic.
( 0xFF & 0x01 ) == ( 0x00 | 0x01 )
People still see the same thing, regardless of how the decision to show it is reached.