
Twitter rewrites developer policy to better support research and ‘good’ bots - ajaviaad
https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/10/twitter-rewrites-developer-policy-to-better-support-academic-research-and-use-of-good-bots/
======
aquova
While I hope this is a step in the right direction, I'm not too wowed by this
new policy. The term "good bot" is incredibly vague, and I wasn't able to find
a much better definition within the policy change itself. The limitations they
want to set on bots aren't too limiting either, basically if you pinky swear
to behave, you're a good bot. They mention things like no bulk following or
spam posting content, but surely these things could be limited in some way by
their API, with whitelisted exemptions for the academic groups they want to
target?

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.

~~~
sneak
I personally object to these sorts of editorial labels. Bots are operated by
humans; these are human accounts. They’re just alts. They should not be
treated differently. There’s no such thing as a “bot post”: just human beings
using different types of software to author posts.

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.

~~~
wpietri
As a person who runs a bot (@sfships) as well as a real Twitter account
(@williampietri), I strongly disagree. It's like saying that there's no
difference between talking to the store manager and standing next to an in-
store TV running a commercial on a loop.

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.

~~~
jethro_tell
I think instead of disambiguating between good and bad bots, they should just
allow 'bot accounts' @NAME - bot. If bots want to do their thing, that is
fine, and there's certainly a place for bot accounts, it's just when they
mascaraed as people.

I'm not sure how you separate them out entirely, I would assume that twitter
knows though.

~~~
behindsight
(slightly offtopic, hope you don't mind)

I believe the term is: masquerade.

Though mascaraed is technically correct, it just denotes wearing mascara and
not to "mask" oneself as someone else.

~~~
a1369209993
I'm fairly sure "mascara" isn't valid as a intransitive verb (transitive would
be applying mascara _to_ something), so "when they mascaraed as people" would
still be incorrect. Wearing mascara would be "when they _were_ mascaraed as
people". (Although it's probably a typo rather than a word choice error, so
<shrug>.)

------
dtrailin
Lots of those that build on the Twitter platform gets burned at some point.
They have shown not themselves to be a reliable partner. Any company doing
social media management at some point gets hurt by changing APIs and
increasing fees, sometimes causing fatal damage to their business.

~~~
riffic
>They have shown themselves to be a reliable partner

I hope you mean the opposite? Twitter has long been an unreliable partner in
the developer ecosystem.

~~~
bmelton
Not sure if edited, but your quote is slightly off. Should be

> 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.

~~~
rhizome
Even GP flailed it and put the 'not' in the wrong place. Should be "They have
shown themselves not to be a reliable partner."

~~~
dorkwood
Also acceptable would be "they have shown themselves to be a reliable
partner... not"

~~~
a1369209993
That could be interpreted as "they have not shown themselves to be a reliable
partner" (ie we don't know) instead of the correct "they have shown themselves
to not be a reliable partner" (ie we know they aren't), though.

------
MrGilbert
I had a bot once, which would tweet a single word from the 300k most used
words in German every 15 minutes (there is a corpus for that). The bot even
had "Bot" in it's name.

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.

~~~
lucasmullens
I mean, in German you can cram a pretty large amount of hateful information
into a single word, since many words are a combination of words. I'd be
curious to see what specifically was flagged.

~~~
MrGilbert
Well, mostly related to 1933 - 1945 references, if I recall it correct.
Basically the "N-Word"-category, but related to jewish people. I think one
tweet also said "Judenvernichtung" ("extermination of the Jews").

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.

~~~
lopmotr
If your intent was to show the most commonly used German words, then modifying
the corpus for political or rule-breaking reasons kind of takes away its
value, doesn't it? Twitter just isn't a place that tolerates all cultures the
way an impartial academic would.

~~~
jsjddbbwj
Literally the definition of censorship.

~~~
gowld
Yes censorship is a major part of fighting Nazis in the largest war ever held
on Earth.

------
spondyl
> Twitter says since it introduced a new developer review process in July
> 2018, it has reviewed over a million developer applications and approved
> 75%.

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 :(

------
QuinnyPig
"Twitter rewrites developer policy" is a frequent enough occurrence that I'd
be highly reluctant to build anything material on top of the ever-shifting
sands that comprise their APIs.

~~~
penagwin
> I'd be reluctant to use their API's.

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.

~~~
wpietri
The choice is of what to do with one's time. If Twitter had been a reliable
partner to developers, more people would make things for it.

~~~
penagwin
Fair enough, that's a good point.

Now that you mention it, a bot-oriented twitter clone might be interesting...

------
JoeMayoBot
I've been supporting their API for several years, with a 3rd party library.
It's always been mixed feelings, remembering the early days when the ecosystem
was exciting and growing, yet the intermediate years when it felt like
developers and businesses that built on their platform were getting screwed.
Overall, it would be great if they could figure out how to clean up the bad
actors, yet build a thriving platform for innovation - a balance they seem
tortured to achieve. While a lot of developers have come and gone, I'm still
hoping for better.

------
baggachipz
Years ago I wrote a bot to correct people's poor grammar (specifically "I
could care less"), stayed within the API limits, and clearly labeled the
account as a bot. Banned by Twitter within a week. Their policies have always
been arbitrary and selective, and this kind of vague language ensures that
will continue.

~~~
andrewzah
I’m glad it got banned, frankly. Those sorts of bots on Reddit are extremely
spammy and annoying.

Being a “grammar nazi” used to be a thing on Reddit and I’m glad it died out.

~~~
baggachipz
It violated no rules, and was all in good fun. All it did was reply with "Are
you sure you _couldn 't_ care less?"

~~~
nl
I'm glad it got banned too - bot replies are the worst.

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...](https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/could-care-less-
versus-couldnt-care-less)

~~~
zimpenfish
Linguists and professional grammarians agree.

[http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/%7Emyl/languagelog/archives/001182...](http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/%7Emyl/languagelog/archives/001182.html)

[http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001201.h...](http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001201.html)

------
TheSwordsman
The issue I see is that it limits the usage to those associated with Academic
Institutions. What if you're a data scientist, or an interested person, not
working in Academia? Any research you'd want to do and publish isn't good
enough, unrelated to the research itself? Seems unfortunate.

~~~
scarejunba
That's life, my man. If you think you're going to get the same access as Raj
Chetty is, you're in for a rude surprise. The society of academia is built on
trust and since people abhor providing information, academics who have other
means of demonstrating trustworthiness will be the ones with access.

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.

------
kdamica
I run a couple of 'good' bots:

[https://twitter.com/thehugfairy](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](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.

------
dickjocke
Has anyone ever been refused a developer account? I wanted to write some
scraper and did the form, but they rejected, told me in the email there was no
appeal, and I guess that's it?

~~~
ceejayoz
Yes. I got rejected because their email asking for more info went to spam, and
that rejection was final, with no appeal permitted.

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.

~~~
dickjocke
Actually, yes I recall now this is exactly what happened to me! I applied and
forgot about it, assuming it didn't matter to them when I responded. What a
bummer

------
minimaxir
As someone who has made GPT-2-based Twitter bots, I think the reasonable
compromise to the arbitrary app approval process is to allow limited bot
access (tweeting only, no replies) through the API without requiring app
approval. That would cover the majority of genuine fun bot use cases.

------
cfv
As long as they stop leaving apps dead on the water whenever they decide to
maybe develop something remotely related, as has happened several times in the
past, then I guess this is good? My previous exp with them isn't super
encouraging unfortunately.

~~~
rhizome
This could very well be a "they let Jack remain CEO" dangle, so I'm going to
be waiting for another shoe to drop. People will jump on it right away and one
of those people will be the first to get burned by whatever develops (and I'm
pretty sure there will be burning in the future), and we'll hear about it
then. That's the point at which I'll decide to participate or not.

------
homero
Never trust Twitter API or waste time developing on it. Many burnt bridges.

------
benologist
Hard to believe they won't artificially stifle or prohibit successful use
cases, like every other time people built on Twitter. There used to be a whole
ecosystem of successful alternate clients, link shorteners, image/video
hosting, tweet analytics and other software and it all got deliberately
destroyed as Twitter wanted to appropriate the engagement those developers
had.

[https://www.accuracast.com/news/social-media-7471/twitter-
ba...](https://www.accuracast.com/news/social-media-7471/twitter-bans-third-
party-apps/)

> In effect ad networks like ‘Sponsored Tweets’ and ‘Ad.ly’ will be
> discontinued.

[https://thenextweb.com/twitter/2012/08/17/twitter-4/](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.

------
justlexi93
We need real human customer support and not some automated system based
algorithms

------
anonytrary
I don't like the term "good bot" and I really don't like the term "'good'
bot", as if bots are always evil. We should just think of them "useful bots",
"useless bots", or "malicious bots".

------
zacksinclair
Seems like we're going full circle with Twitter now.

------
gcc_programmer
I know I will be downvoted, but I don't care: why are people using Twitter? To
me it's the most vile and disgusting platform: no signal, just noise. On top
of that, the people that run it are effectively coming up with arbitrary
progressive left-wing policies on restricting free speech: for proof, watch
this: [https://youtu.be/DZCBRHOg3PQ](https://youtu.be/DZCBRHOg3PQ) after
seeing I realised Twitter/Facebook/Google/Apple are evil corporations taking
away your freedom with you cheering to it. Why are you using Twitter's
platform? For business? Do you want to make business from Twitter's users
which are mind-numbed angry, twitching zombies? Are there no business
opportunities elsewhere? Anyone who is doing any sort of business related to
social media is wasting their time: it's a broken system that deserves to be
boycotted. To anyone who would call me angry: I am saying this so you open
your mind about the pointlessness of social media: I dont use it, and I seem
to live a nice life, only time I get angry is when I think about social media,
like in this post. Oh well, this is HN after all, born and bred in silicon
valley where such blasphemy will not be tolerated. But lets see.

------
GrumpyNl
Had to look up how many engineers they have, around 4000. That's a lot.

------
jdivo
Bots just need banned or API limited... Twitter needs to be re-humazized

------
allovernow
They're just picking winners that align with their own ideology at this point.
The dangers of authoritarianism are latent in any power structure - whether
government, corporate, or other.

This is bad for society.

~~~
rhizome
> _They 're just picking winners that align with their own ideology at this
> point_

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.

~~~
gizmo385
I mean at a certain point, does a difference in volume not become a difference
in kind? Washington Times and Fox News are effectively "whitelisting" the
content that goes onto their sites, whereas the stance that
Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn are taking here is a blacklist. Those are different
things.

~~~
rhizome
> _does a difference in volume not become a difference in kind?_

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.

