<story><title>Twitter to label &apos;good&apos; bot accounts</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-58510594</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>buro9</author><text>&amp;quot;good&amp;quot; implies there is a &amp;quot;bad&amp;quot;, but both are subjective... for whom?&lt;p&gt;I thought the same about Google Bot scraping websites, many websites would argue that this is universally good. In fact at Cloudflare the Google Bot was on a system wide allow list as it was &amp;quot;good&amp;quot; (in the older and now long deprecated original system years ago).&lt;p&gt;But &amp;quot;good&amp;quot; from one perspective isn&amp;#x27;t &amp;quot;good&amp;quot; from all perspectives, it&amp;#x27;s subjective.&lt;p&gt;Google Bot isn&amp;#x27;t good to the site that contains private information and launched too early and didn&amp;#x27;t yet have it&amp;#x27;s security in place and was scraped and the private exposed.&lt;p&gt;Bots are just machines, and machines aren&amp;#x27;t &amp;quot;good&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;bad&amp;quot;, the actions they perform aren&amp;#x27;t even &amp;quot;good&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;bad&amp;quot;... it remains relative to each person as to whether they are good or bad.&lt;p&gt;Even with bots on Twitter, for some any bot is bad, or advertising bots are good, or they&amp;#x27;re bad. Creating the idea of a &amp;quot;blue tick for automated accounts&amp;quot; doesn&amp;#x27;t seem like the smartest move and just brings in the same problem that the blue tick has with humans.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m glad they&amp;#x27;re thinking about the problem, but a binary solution to a subjective and relative problem feels more like a regression than a step forward.&lt;p&gt;Calling this &amp;quot;known&amp;quot; bots would be a better thing, especially if tools to filter tweets by specific known bots existed.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chrbarrol</author><text>As far as I can see only the BBC article is claiming Twitter is trying to label bots as &amp;quot;good&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;bad&amp;quot;. The actual system appears to be for linking bot accounts to real accounts (ie. who made this bot) or simply label an account as &amp;quot;automated&amp;quot; to give better transparency, which to me sounds like an overall positive feature.</text></comment>
<story><title>Twitter to label &apos;good&apos; bot accounts</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-58510594</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>buro9</author><text>&amp;quot;good&amp;quot; implies there is a &amp;quot;bad&amp;quot;, but both are subjective... for whom?&lt;p&gt;I thought the same about Google Bot scraping websites, many websites would argue that this is universally good. In fact at Cloudflare the Google Bot was on a system wide allow list as it was &amp;quot;good&amp;quot; (in the older and now long deprecated original system years ago).&lt;p&gt;But &amp;quot;good&amp;quot; from one perspective isn&amp;#x27;t &amp;quot;good&amp;quot; from all perspectives, it&amp;#x27;s subjective.&lt;p&gt;Google Bot isn&amp;#x27;t good to the site that contains private information and launched too early and didn&amp;#x27;t yet have it&amp;#x27;s security in place and was scraped and the private exposed.&lt;p&gt;Bots are just machines, and machines aren&amp;#x27;t &amp;quot;good&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;bad&amp;quot;, the actions they perform aren&amp;#x27;t even &amp;quot;good&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;bad&amp;quot;... it remains relative to each person as to whether they are good or bad.&lt;p&gt;Even with bots on Twitter, for some any bot is bad, or advertising bots are good, or they&amp;#x27;re bad. Creating the idea of a &amp;quot;blue tick for automated accounts&amp;quot; doesn&amp;#x27;t seem like the smartest move and just brings in the same problem that the blue tick has with humans.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m glad they&amp;#x27;re thinking about the problem, but a binary solution to a subjective and relative problem feels more like a regression than a step forward.&lt;p&gt;Calling this &amp;quot;known&amp;quot; bots would be a better thing, especially if tools to filter tweets by specific known bots existed.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>willis936</author><text>The answer for bots is the same for dogs: who we call good.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s going to change over time, sometimes quickly.  Today bots made by individuals and labeled as bots that once per hour makes some clever markov speech tweet are good.  Bots that spam reply to all tweets of a pattern and pretend to be humans are bad.&lt;p&gt;Battles will get fought in the very large grey zone but the entity that gets the final say on &amp;quot;good enough&amp;quot; is the owner.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.threepanelsoul.com&amp;#x2F;comic&amp;#x2F;dog-philosophy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.threepanelsoul.com&amp;#x2F;comic&amp;#x2F;dog-philosophy&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>