Twitter is Adding Bot Labels to Bot Accounts

Twitter is adding bot labels in order to make their website more transparent and allow people to distinguish between bot accounts and accounts of real human beings. These bot labels can be added voluntarily to Twitter accounts that are automated.

The bot label looks like a little robot icon located next to the Twitter account’s profile name. If you see such an icon, it means that the messages are automatically posted from this Twitter account. The same icon can also be seen in your feed, where the robot icon will be displayed under the profile name.

These bot labels are voluntary, allowing ‘Good Bots’ to be recognized as such. However, malicious bot accounts will remain untagged, which means that bots that are created to do harm will remain undetectable for regular people.

Some people think any bot is a ‘Bad Bot’, but that is simply not true.  Bots can be really helpful for finding great entertaining or useful information. Breaking news, funny stories, and silly emoji mashups, all can be found using specialized bots. The bot label is simply there to provide users with more information and the purpose of this particular bot account, allowing them to decide whether they want to follow such an account or not.

Currently, it is not designed to be a universal identification between a bot and human Twitter accounts, but it is certainly a step onto the path of bots finally being labeled as such. The overabundance of bot accounts has always plagued Twitter, which prompted them to create such labels.

This new feature has been in development for quite some time and has gone through initial testing in September. Also, in 2020 all bot accounts were required to be identified if they wanted to use the platform. What this means is that bot accounts that are not using a Bot Label are essentially breaking Twitter’s rules, which makes it a lot easier to remove such accounts.

What do you think about the new bot labels? Do you believe it will help weed out the ‘bad bots’ or will the situation remain unchanged? Tell us in the comments below.