Twitter is considering creating a new type of account especially for bots that will identify them as automated. This will be done some time next year said the company in a blog post on Thursday. The plans for this program have long been resumed after a long-pause. The company said bot accounts “can bring a lot of value to the service,” but acknowledged that “it can be confusing to people if it’s not clear that these accounts are automated.”
For years, twitter has operated as both, a boon and a bane to the new world news community. But it has so often been a hub for promoting fake news. After years of facing calls from misinformation researchers to disclose information about bots, this comes as a big move for the company. Bots have been used for years to influence and make certain narratives appear popular on its site thereby shaping public opinion.
Since March, the site has been employing developers to identify automated accounts as bots but still resisted pressure to apply a label on all automated accounts citing that “calls for bot labelling don’t capture the problem we’re trying to solve.”
Additionally, twitter also announced on Thursday that it would build a new ‘memoralised account’ in the following year for people who have died.
This will also likely impact information campaigns that tend to abuse such accounts to spread a narrative.
Twitter announced last month that it would restart its verification program early next year, after pausing submissions in 2017 amid criticism over how it awarded the blue check-mark badges used to authenticate the identity of prominent accounts.
It said it would begin removing verified badges from inactive and incomplete accounts that fail to adhere to the new guidelines as of Jan. 20, 2021. But inactive accounts of people who have died would be left untouched while twitter continues to work on the new memorial feature.
