TOW #9 (written text)- "The Rise of Twitter Bots" by Rob Dubbin

On November 7, 2013, the popular social networking site, Twitter, began selling publicly on the New York Stock exchange. Today, Twitter has over 200 million active users, prompting thousands of reporters and advertisers to take advantage of the great marketing opportunity. In his article, “The Rise of Twitter Bots,” Twitter-enthusiast Rob Dubbin talks about the rising popularity of Twitter and “Twitter bots.” Twitter bots is an automated program that gives reporters and advertisers the ability to tweet without actually going on Twitter. Using WordNet, a Naval database with almost every known English word, Twitter bots create tweets regarding a specific topic that are posted during set times each day. Rob Dubbin, himself, runs multiple Twitter accounts that use their own Twitter bots. On his most popular account, “RealHumanPraise,” the bot creates tweets every two minutes that mock CNN News. In the article, Dubbin informs Twitter users of the ability of Twitter bots to make them more aware of the thousands of accounts that spam Twitter with advertisements and random statements produced by the bots. In order to achieve this purpose, Dubbin uses exemplification to highlight the many uses of Twitter bots. Ranjit Bhatnagar, who runs an account named “Pentametron,” that “Scours Twitter every hour on the hour and retweets the first rhyming couplet that it can find.” Twitter accounts such as this are purely for fun and entertainment, while others use Twitter to advertise him or herself or a product. Former Republican presidential nominee, Newt Gingrich, used a bot that spammed Twitter with his political ideologies is order to gain the support of voters during the 2008 election.

            Although Rob Dubbin is a “Twitter expert,” in my opinion his article “The Rise of Twitter Bots” failed to accomplish its purpose. It was written an informal article, but is very confusing to a reader that does not possess the knowledge of Twitter and the Internet that Dubbin does. He references multiple online databases and programs that are certainly unknown to the average reader, therefore making his argument ineffective.

source- digibuzzme.com