Conspirador Norteño Profile picture
Data Scientist/Musician/Participant in the General Confusion @trutherbotprop Resist autocracy and research/counter disinformation. I serve the realm.

Sep 28, 2018, 10 tweets

From time to time one encounters the erroneous rumor that Twitter bots can't reply. Let's take a look at a prolific counterexample. Meet @Guds_barn ("God's children" in Swedish).

Here's @Guds_barn's tweet schedule. This account is quite high-volume - it's likely that the only reason it doesn't always run 24/7 is that it reaches the daily limit of 2400 tweets in fewer than 24 hours.

As seen in the previous tweet, @Guds_barn has used an admirably abundant variety of apps/services to automate tweets. The heavy automated activity starts in early August 2018 - the tweets prior to that are mostly via the Twitter website.

The tool @Guds_barn seems to have settled on for automating tweets is twty. This isn't strictly an automation service; rather, it's an open source project for interfacing with the Twitter API. One could just easily create analytical tools with it as build a bot.

Many of @Guds_barn's tweets are present in multiple languages (mostly English and Swedish, but there are less frequent ones as well).

Let's get back to the topic of replies. 52312 of 61648 @Guds_barn's original tweets are replies, most of which are quote tweets of its own tweets injected into conversations @Guds_barn wasn't previously part of. Is there a pattern in the choice of tweets to reply to?

The answer is yes - each reply tweet seems to have an associated set of terms that trigger the reply. For example, the abortion tweet with the demon emoji is used as a reply to tweets containing "kill", "murder", and/or "abort".

(If you're trying to trigger a reply from @Guds_barn, note that due to Twitter's volume limits you may or may not get one. There are a lot of tweets matching the search terms this account uses.)

Thanks to @ZellaQuixote for ongoing aid with research/refinement of techniques used. Also hat tip to @accidntlmystic for the lead.

Update: this thread drew the attention of @Guds_barn. Interestingly, so did an older #SethRich thread that I amended a few days ago.

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