Individual Work
the way bot

@thewaybot is a Twitter bot created by Eli Brody in 2013, growing out of a bot developed for NaNoGenMo (National Novel Generation Month) of that year. The bot trawls Twitter for tweets that contain the phrase "I like it when" and tweets these onto its own stream after removing all special characters and identifiers. The bot ran until 14 June 2017, when it was put on hiatus for "misbehaving," according to a tweet from Eli Brody posted on 26 May 2018. The bot was built in the Ruby programming language.

Author statement: 
The Way Bot is a machine archivist, sharing discoveries while trawlingl through easily-identifiable expressions of human emotion. No further processing of these potential human insights is attempted. The Way Bot is a vessel of appropriation: seeking, filtering, cleaning, and framing tweets in a digital archive, perhaps for future analysis. A note of caution: The Way Bot is only mildly curated by a human attendant. The Way Bot speaks with a voice that is not theirs, making them capable of hurtful and insensitive speech. Filters are in place for blatant hate words, but human language can be subtly insidious without triggering automatic detection. An effort is made to reduce these incidents, and offensive speech is removed as it is discovered. However, hate and oppression still slip in (and do exist, in the bot's archive). The creator wishes to apologize for any oppression, systematic or otherwise, upheld by this bot.

Discussion

This entry needs slight expansion:

- screenshot(s) if possible
- literary qualities
- discussion of this "misbehaving"
- example(s) if possible