Looking Outwards 03: Twitter Bots

Made by Ed Summer, @congressedits tweets out in real time anonymous edits made to Wikipedia pages from IP addresses within Congress.

The first thing I noticed that’s different about this bot is that it has a high ratio of followers to tweets. This signifies that each tweet carries meaningful information. Most bots seem to “spit out” tweets constantly, hoping for the few every now and then that carry significance. However, this one is different: it’s reporting to the world news that would otherwise be difficult to obtain or decipher. Some of my favorite posts are below: