Twitter Bots

14th December 2011 10 mins Season 1 Episode 6

Jon Ronson visits web analyst Tim Hwang (Web Ecology Project), who along with his colleagues has developed bots for the social media service Twitter. The bots generate random tweets in an experiment to see if they could steer the conversation amongst real human tweeters.

View season

Up next

Next Episode

View season

Season 1 · Episode 7

JON VS JON

The spam bot was created by academics formerly at Warwick University. Jon Ronson discusses his frustration with the fact many of the tweets seem plausible, even though they are about things he would never talk about himself. With the creators of this account refusing to take it down, it seems the only way to resolve this is by meeting them.

Episode details

Details

Talent

Cast & Crew

Recommended