&c.

Twitter Bots

A few tiny programs that automatically update their own Twitter accounts.

Advocacy Bots

NYT Anonymous automatically tweets links to articles in the New York Times citing sources on condition of anonymity. The bot was inspired by the work of media critic Jay Rosen and New York Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan. She subsequently mentioned the bot in one of her columns. The bot was also referenced in a journalism class at Stanford, and in the Columbia Journalism Review.

WaPo Anonymous tweets links to articles in the Washington Post citing anonymous sources. The bot retired at the end of December 2022.

NYPD Secret Vendors Bot tweets payments from the NYPD to vendors that have been redacted for "privacy / security" reasons. The NYPD paid these secret vendors $34.5M in FY19. Much of this is for surveillance equipment and training. But it's hard to understand the security implications of paying $28.5K to secret vendors for food. The Secret Vendors Bot tweets these payments daily as they are published on the Comptroller's website http://checkbook.nyc.

Special Counsel Bot tweeted changes to the DOJ's Special Counsel Office web page. Checking every minute so you don't have to -- and logging the changes for posterity.

NYPD edits automatically tweets anonymous edits to Wikipedia made from IP addresses registered to the New York Police Department. The bot was inspired by Kelly Weill's story in Capital New York about Wikipedia edits downplaying the NYPD's involvement in high profile cases. The bot runs on the open source code behind CongressEdits. NYPDedits was written up in The New Republic, Capital New York, and the New York Daily News.

NYPD Bot monitors Google News and tweets headlines about the New York City Police Department and also blogs them automatically at nypd.news. It was created for the Legal Aid Society's Cop Accountability Project.

Officer Bot monitors Google News and tweets headlines about the police misconduct and police-involved shootings around the U.S. It was inspired by NYPD Bot and the work of Campaign Zero. Retired by Twitter in January 2020.

NYPD Diff monitors a handful of New York City Police Department web pages looking for staff changes. Also created for the Legal Aid Society's Cop Accountability Project.

FISA Bot was a real-time political satire. It expedited processing of FISA warrant requests via Twitter by automatically responding based on the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court case history. After processing 5,000 responses, the bot retired in June 2015.

Museum Bots

Inspired by the original Museum Bot and the Cooper-Hewitt GET random API call, I built a few museum bots of my own… and then a few more. These bots tweet random objects from the collections of the museums below four times a day.

Art Institute of Chicago Bot