Art Bot Suspensions

Saturday. September 12, 2020 - 1 min

I’m devastated! This week, all of my Twitter bots were suspended.

The reason for these suspensions, which all happened simultaneously, is unclear. They definitely do not violate Twitter’s Rules or Terms of Service, and they were properly registered with my phone and email address. To my knowledge, they have never had a negative interaction with any user on the site, nor were they ever blocked or reported by anyone.

In fact, people were playing with the connect four bot and having lots of fun with it, and users were retweeting the art and poems being shared by the art bots.

I understand that Twitter is looking to clear their platform of automated malicious activity, especially in the lead-up to the American Presidential elections, and so perhaps my bot’s automated behaviour resulted in them being flagged for suspension.

In the past, art bots have been caught up in Twitter’s attempts to clear malicious actors from their platform, and have been reinstated. I’ve filed an appeal on all of the accounts, and I’m still waiting to hear back from them.

I’m going to leave the blog posts about them up for now, and leave all of the links to those Twitter accounts active, because I’m hopeful Twitter will restore them.

In the mean time, the github repositories and botwiki pages for these projects are still live.

Bot Connect Four

Art Museum Bot

Poem Bot

Cristyn Howard

Software Developer. Dynamically-typed.