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This is the repository for the online module Bots as Digital Infrapuncture, commissioned by the Utrecht University
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bots-as-digital-infrapunctures/content/Track 4 - Bot Logic/3-examples.md

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Title: Some Examples of Bots Slug: 03-s3-examples Date: 2020-11-01 12:03 Summary: What are some examples of bots?

We will give a few examples of bots to show how bot logics are put into practice.

Stay Woke Bot

In 2016, Darius Kazemi, a computer programmer and artist, made staywokebot1 in conversation with Black Lives Matter activists DeRay Mckesson and Samuel Sinyangwe. The bot sent out messages to its Twitter followers to uplift activists' morale and provide joyful interactions. Kazemi has also worked on private bots for activists that take over some of the repetitive or distressing work. They attempt to mitigate the harm and exhaustion that activists are exposed to on digital infrapunctures such as Twitter by acting as a type of prosthesis.

Parliament Wikiedits

One of the guidelines of English Wikipedia is to avoid conflicts of interest by not writing about yourself, family, friends, clients, employers, or your financial and other relationships.

If you edit on Wikipedia without making an account, your IP address will be made public. Journalist and developer Tom Scott made use this situation to make Parliament Wikiedits2, a bot that will look at recent edits on the British Parliament made by anonymous users and retweet the ones that were made in the IP address range belonging to the British Parliament.

The bot was resurrected by Ed Summers in 2014, after the IP addresses had been intentionally modified following a rejected Freedom of Information Request. Summers made the code available on Github3 and instructed how users could modify the IP addresses and make their own bot. This inspired multiple other iterations, among which the most well-known one is congress-editors4.

It turned out that most edits made by these IP addresses were fixing punctuation, spelling or grammar. Nonetheless, they sparked the imagination of many others which installed their own instance of the bot to patrol their national governments.

OCRbot

OCRbot5 is a bot made for Mastodon, which responds to users calling who call it. It is used to run OCR (Optical Character Recognition) on images containing text and it is an especially helpful feature for generated captions for vision impaired people. This example of a bot shows how users can alter the functionalities of a digital infrastructure through a bot. Where there is a lack in the Mastodon interface, bots can be used to supplement it and in this way increase the accessibility of the site. In this case however, most Mastodon interfaces already include a caption text box in the interface. Nonetheless the bot makes up for the failure of users to fill in the captions when adding an image to their posts. The code for this bot is available of Github6.

Footnotes