Thread by @medicalaxioms

How to Spot a Bot:
A tutorial.

I’ve noticed lots of people fighting with bots lately. Which is sort of like a duck hunter going out for the day and coming home with a bunch of decoys he’s mistakenly stolen from other hunters.

Let’s learn how to tell a real duck from plastic.

Here’s a bot. I don’t actually know 100% for sure this is a bot, but it walks like a bot and quacks like a bot.

So it’s either a really lazy bot-like person or a bot.

Savy here has

1. No profile picture and no background picture.

2. A username with a bunch of numbers in it

3. Been around 2 years

4. 3 followers

5. No location

6. No webpage

If you look through Savy’s follows, there is a pattern. Medicine, chess, tennis.

This suggests there may even really be a human being in the other end of that line.

Here’s why it doesn’t matter.

If a “person” has made themselves that anonymous, they can do and say and argue any point. They have no character to uphold. No connection to their human identity.

Bot or not, this twitter account is not worth answering. Not worth arguing with. Not worth engaging with.

If you bother to spend any time on social media, and you accept you can’t get those hours of your life back (😭😭😭), you have to set some boundaries.

The bots live here. If you want your boundaries to include these bots, go right ahead.

Personally, I find human beings more interesting to engage with.

So when bots try to engage, I say, “No bot. Not today.”
🤖🤖🤖

I’ve noticed some bots speak good English and others don’t. Some argue and some fall silent.

All bots block the same.

❌

And they are gone.

I have probably blocked some real people through the years.

It’s really not my problem.

If you act like a bot, don’t be surprised if you get blocked by people who don’t have time for all that mess.

I’ve also noticed since I crossed some threshold of followers (?50K) I get followed by a lot more bots.

This is good for my humility.

Being loved by bots is nothing to be proud of.

🤖💖🤖💖🤖💖🤖💖

In fact, all the bots and bot-like activity has resulted in me taking this social media experiment a lot less seriously.

A significant part of the emotion stirred up in this platform is just bots ebbing and flowing and trying to generate chaos.

This is why the average person in real life seems increasingly smarter than the average person on the Twitter.

Real people are not as dumb as these bots.

People may accuse me of being a bot. My profile has some of the characteristics.

Hints:
- bots do not have daughters #1-4
- bots do not marry their special lady friend
- bots do not do #medgardening

You can look deeper into a twitter profile to decide if you really think it is a bot.

Or do what I do and in about 3 seconds size up all the available details and make a split second decision.

Here’s what I don’t do with bots:
- argue
- follow
- tolerate any mischief

I do sometimes leave silent bots unblocked.

They are like the mice I let live in my garage.
🐭🐭🐭

My kids say, “Dad who ate all the grass seed?”
“The mice that live in the garage.”
“Why don’t you get rid of them?”
“I don’t have the heart.”