Twitter is testing a new feature that will allow the identification of bot accounts. As announced by the Twitter team a few months ago, this initiative will provide more context and allow users to clearly identify automated accounts.
Twitter tests a tagging feature for bot accounts
Thousands of bots on Twitter are now common, some relevant and others useless, since they provide useful information to users and amuse with curiosities.
So you will see that there are bots that range from reporting weather conditions or news to show the news that is being added to Netflix. However, it’s not always clear to users when accounts are automated or managed by users.
Twitter has already requested that developers identify these kinds of accounts as bots and provide more information, such as who manages the account or what it’s about. However, this needs to be done manually by developers.
To make this less of an issue, Twitter is testing tags for developers to identify their bot accounts.
When these accounts signal that they are automated, you’ll know exactly why they’re there when you engage with them. When automated tags are used to identify the good bots from the spammy ones, it’s all about transparency.
Of course, this will not be an option for those bots dedicated to scamming people, sharing spam, fake news, or any dishonest purpose.
This tagging system is currently being evaluated in a group of more than 500 developers to study the issues and provide comments on Twitter. The use of tags for bot accounts will be expanded to other developers if these tests are successful.
