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Twitter Bots and Fair Use

I made a bot called @corruptum, and he uses a lot of copy­right­ed con­tent in his cor­pus, so I was won­der­ing whether it was legal and whether its use qual­i­fied as Fair Use.

The Lonely Project

You don’t know who they are. It gives you no han­dles, no iden­ti­fy­ing infor­ma­tion, no loca­tion. All you know is they’re typ­ing in English and that is how they’re feel­ing at this gen­er­al moment in time. And then it just sends them this tweet. It’s one tweet over and over again: Someone over here want­ed you to know that you’re not alone.”

Translating World Clock

I’m going to talk about a bot-like cre­ation that was occa­sioned by NaNoGenMo last year, World Clock. It has a rather curi­ous sto­ry to what’s hap­pened after I devel­oped it. 

Protest Bots

I wrote a let­ter to my local rep­re­sen­ta­tive, and he wrote me back and it was this boil­er­plate of all this bull­shit. So I was read­ing it and just men­tal­ly cross­ing off line after line of bull­shit, so I decid­ed to make a bot that does that for me. What it does is it goes into an API that lists mem­bers of Congress and their Twitter accounts, picks one at ran­dom, picks their most recent tweet, and it retweets it but replaces a cer­tain per­cent­age of all the char­ac­ters of that tweet with black or gray rec­tan­gles so that the remain­ing amount of let­ters that you get to actu­al­ly read is equiv­a­lent to the cur­rent lev­el of Congress’ approval rat­ing, which I get from The Huffington Post’s API.

Bot Activism Through Tools Instead of Content

So what I did was I made a pret­ty pow­er­ful anti-harassment tool, and I’m kind of leery of… It’s one of those things that like I, I feel weird about it because I don’t have a tremen­dous use for it myself, but I know that oth­er peo­ple do. And I’ve talked to peo­ple about this, and I sort of made the deci­sion not to put it on Github or be pub­lic about it for main­ly the rea­son that I think Twitter is kind of weird with harass­ment, and I think they’re weird with block­ing, and I think they have a strange track record of mak­ing the tools that are use­ful to peo­ple who are try­ing to pro­tect them­selves and be safer sort of weird­ly hard­er to access and kind of obscure.

@congressedits: Politics + Wikipedia + Twitter = ?

I think there’s a set of bizarre indi­vid­u­als in the Capitol build­ing that once they real­ized that @congressedits was there and had a lot of fol­low­ers, they were adding these crazy things to Wikipedia. So in this case somebody’s say­ing Rumsfeld was an alien lizard.

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