Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: An important role of the historian is to humanize the past, while confronting the audience with the simultaneous alienness of it. What Mark Sample calls “bots of conviction” can enable that confrontation (“Protest”). This artifact shows how to make a Twitter bot (an account that tweets automatically) powered by a variety of different generators. The potential power of a Twitter bot for history is demonstrated by Caleb McDaniel’s “Every Three Minutes” bot, which tweets every three minutes with the historical details of a slave sale in the United States. The associated paradata post by McDaniel, “Slave Sales on Twitter,” discusses the underlying research and rationale for this particular bot. Students could use Zach Whalen’s templates to tweet a historical event in real time, to adopt the persona of a historical personage, or to follow McDaniel’s example to uncover similar histories

Shawn Graham

Zach Whalen

Humanities Commons

Tiny Flashing Thumbs: How to Bot your way to Fake News Success1/12Tiny Flashing Thumbs: How to Botyour way to Fake News Successzach whalen FollowFeb 3, 2017 · 13 min readTiny Flashing Thumbs: How to Bot your way to Fake News Success2/12Making up the news is hard work, especially when the real news comes so fast and sofurious. Why keep writing fake news the old-fashioned way — typing it with your fingers— when you can make a robot that will do it for you? Then you can use all that free timeyou’ve gained to learn how to play cards, improve your social skills, explore a career inmanufacturing, or just contemplate your own mortality while awaiting the inevitable.There are lots of reasons to make a Twitter bot, and likewise, there are lots of ways tomake a Twitter Bot. Most programming languages or environments can interactautomatically with Twitter, so many people have created bots that accomplish just aboutall of the things that human users do with Twitter.As with many other job sectors where certain tasks have been deemed too dangerous,tedious, or demeaning for humans, robots are stepping up to the task of politicaldiscourse with enthusiasm and intensity. After all, if your goal is to elevate a politics thatdehumanizes, oppresses, or stands to directly harm most of humanity, it would seeminconsistent to enlist the help of actual people in your misanthropic quest for power.It’s time to build your own robot army.. . .In this post, I’m going to teach you one way to make a Twitter Bot, which will beaccomplished with a web-based tool I created for this purpose. In later posts and lessons,we’ll try out different kinds of bots and purposes for bots.I call my tool “SSBot” because it runs in Google Spreadsheets. I first created it for mystudents because I wanted to give them an easy access point to bot creation, and whenthat first version proved successful, I upgraded it to a more complete version and openedit up with a wider release. That version (0.4) has now grown stale, so this post is also anintroduction to the fresh, new, and somewhat improved version of SSBot, version 0.5.1.It has some new features which may turn out to introduce some bugs, so bear with me asI work through these.Creating your first bot with my tool requires following a series of steps, but in fact, youcan complete these tasks in a different order. These steps below are organized in a wayTiny Flashing Thumbs: How to Bot your way to Fake News Success3/12that make the most sense to me and generally follow what I do when I’m creating a newbot. Your amount of time with all this will vary, but the fundamental tasks of getting abot tweeting on a schedule usually takes anywhere from 5 minutes to 30 minutes.Customizing your bot to give it purpose, personality, or controversy can take muchlonger. What kind of bot will you make? What will your bot do? Where will you get it’svocabulary from? Will you make the fake news or fake the made news?The directions below are intentionally verbose, so if you want to just jump right in to theSSBot and start playing around, you’re more than welcome to.Step 1: Create your Bot’s Twitter AccountI like to do this first because it gives your bot a sense of identity while you work on it. Youprobably already know how to sign up for a Twitter account, so here are few tips:Use the “infinite gmail” trick for your bot’s email address. This is the trick whereyou add “+something” to the name in your email. For example, my gmail address is“zach.whalen@gmail.com,” but I can also use something like“zach.whalen+myfakenewsbot@gmail.com” and it goes to the same inbox, which isconvenient. Of course, if you want to really separate this bot from your real life, youcan make a bespoke Gmail account.Opt out of everything. Twitter changes this occasionally, but as of now, youraccount signup page includes three already-checked checkboxes that you shoulddefinitely uncheck: “Tailor Twitter by my recent website visits”, “Let others find me bymy email address,” and “Let others find me by my phone number.” The latter twowill be hidden under “Advanced Options.”Do use a phone number. This will save you a step later, and you can alwaysdisconnect this number after the bot set up is complete. Since you can only have oneTwitter account per phone number, text “STOP” to 40404 to disconnect whicheveraccount is currently connected to your phone.Don’t follow anyone, and don’t follow the bot from your real account. Not untilyou’re ready for other people to find it.Tiny Flashing Thumbs: How to Bot your way to Fake News Success4/12Here’s what your signup page should look like.You can customize your bot’s profile now or later, but I always like to give my bots anavatar picture, a nice background, and an informative bio that explains the bot purposewhile disclosing its botness.Step 2. Set up your SpreadsheetTiny Flashing Thumbs: How to Bot your way to Fake News Success5/12Take a look at the SSBot 0.5.1 spreadsheet, and make a copy of your own by going toFile->Make copy… Save it somewhere in your Drive and you’re ready to get started.As you explore the spreadsheet, you’ll find that the complete instructions for setting it upare all included in the sheet. You may therefore wish to follow those instructions insteadof flipping band forth between your sheet and these more verbose instructions.2A: Navigating the SpreadsheetThis is a big spreadsheet with lots of parts, so first let’s take a look at some of those partsand clarify the terms I’m going to be using. I’ve organized it into color-coded sheets ortabs at the bottom:The tabs. Setup, Settings, Preview and log are dedicated to those functions. Green tabs are “constructors”Setup and Settings are important as you’re working on getting the bot’s content toTwitter. The green sheets are the various constructors or ways of assembling text beforesending it out. Edit those to give your bot it’s identity.Another important detail that some people miss: some necessary functions live insidethe “Bot” menu that comes to life when you open the spreadsheet. This menu resides inthe menu bar:Here is the Bot Menu. Here it is.Finally, there’s an important group of options in the yellow “Settings” tab, and the mostimportant of all is the Constructor setting, because that chooses which sheet to pullfrom when running either “Generate Preview” or actually tweeting. It’s set to “markov”by default.Tiny Flashing Thumbs: How to Bot your way to Fake News Success6/122B: Understanding the ConstructorsLike a lot of things that are computery, it’s probably best to learn about the constructorsthrough trial and error: make some changes, hit “Generate Preview” in the Bot Menu,and see if you like what you get. I recommend at least trying all of the constructions tosee how they work. Each one has a brief explanation on the sheet itself, and here aresome slightly-less-brief explanations of each:columns. Here, your bot will start with the B  column and randomly select one ofthe values from B5  onward. Then it will proceed to C  and pick a value from C5afterward, and so on. It will keep moving to the right until it runs out of columnswith text in them or it hits the maximum length specified in the Settings tab. The“Roses are Red” placeholder text demonstrates one use for this template-basedapproach. Still, careful attention to nuances of syntax could let you make somethingmore grammatical with this constructor like @TheHigherDead or the Terms ofService Bot. Corpora (lists) are useful for this kind of template-filling. DariusKazemi’s corpora repository is an excellent resource for lists of things.rows. This is the same thing as columns but sideways, because sometimes the datayou have is arranged that way and its just easier, or maybe it makes more sense toyou to look at it this way. This is also useful if you want to precompose a bunch oftweets that the bot chooses from randomly. Just fill up the B  column with yourtweets.markov. This constructor takes any text it finds in B5  and following and runs itthrough a Markov chaining algorithm to produce a plausible but nonsensical textfragment that sounds sort of like the original text. The results tend to be better if youfeed it two different texts, and even better if their style or tone clashes sharply withone another. You can tweak the “depth” of the Markov-chaining up to 6 (where thehigher the number the more like the original text), and you probably should increasethe Minimum Length to 20 or more in order to avoid single-word tweets. Both ofthese options are in the Settings sheet.every. This constructor works through a list of values, tweeting one then moving onto the next. It’s my version of the @everyword-style bots that exhaust a corpus.every  will rotate its data upon a successful tweet so that the next tweet will alwaysTiny Flashing Thumbs: How to Bot your way to Fake News Success7/12be in B3 . Including the text ***STOP*** will cause the tweeting from thisconstructor to cease.x + y. This one attempts to create a complete sentence by sampling from the corpusin column B  and the corpus in column C . This is the @WhitmanFML-style bot. Itdoes this by finding sentences with conjunctions in them (“and”, ”or”, ”but”, ”nor”,“yet”), splits those sentences into at least two pieces, and Frankenstein’s a newsentence from half or a sentence of column B  and half of a sentence from column C .It helps to have two texts with lots of coordinating conjuctions; otherwise, it can befairly repetitive._ebooks. This constructor uses the same Markov chaining that goes on in themarkov  constructor, with the major difference that its source text is anotherspreadsheet, a TAGS Archive of tweets. This takes some extra setup, like firstcreating a TAGS Archive and letting it collect some things, but the results can bequite fascinating.2C: Understanding the SettingsI’ve mentioned the Settings  tab a few times already, and the rest of the options may beself-explanatory. Or maybe not. I will explain them.Constructor selects which constructor sheet to use.Timing sets the interval tweets will post on. These are pretty limited, unfortunately,because I have to use Google’s internal time-based triggers and there are only somany choices.Minimum and maximum length control the lower and upper limits of the tweets.All of the constructors will respect these constraints except for every , because Ifigure you can control the size of those yourself.Quiet hours sets a curfew and wake up time for your bot, so if a scheduled triggerruns during that period (if you’ve set it to run every 15 minutes for example), itwon’t actually send that out. You can use this to make your bot appear more like areal person, since real people sleep sometimes — unlike our current President.Image urls will be converted to media attachments if you say so. These need to beimages that are publicly accessible on the web, and they need to be fully qualifiedTiny Flashing Thumbs: How to Bot your way to Fake News Success8/12URLs that point to an image. So they should start with http://  and end in .jpg ,.gif , or .png .Markov depth defines the length of the chain’s seed fragments. Longer fragmentsinternally will produce more coherent text externally, but it will start to soundexactly like the original text before too long.Banned words are words that should never appear in your bots’ tweets. This isespecially useful if you’re using the _ebooks  constructor because its raw materialsare unpredictable. There is a built-in ban list already, so words you add here willsimply add more banned words.Removing hashtags and mentions. You should do both of these unless you have areally good reason to. It’s good manners, and unsolicited mentions (@-ing peoplewho don’t follow you) can get you banned.Step 3: Connect your spreadsheet to TwitterThe final step is of course to connect your spreadsheet to Twitter. This involves a fewsteps, settings and authorizations. When things go wrong with SSBot, it’s usually relatedto this part of the process, so please follow closely.To get your spreadsheet talking to Twitter, you need to create a “Twitter App,” arelationship between Twitter and another service. Do this at apps.twitter.com where, ifyou’re logged in to your bot’s account, you’ll see a “Create New App” button. Hit thatbutton.Application DetailsThe first three fields in the App Creation workflow can be just about anything. The“Name” must be unique, and the website URL must be complete, but other than that,there doesn’t seem to be any review of these, at least not for now.Tiny Flashing Thumbs: How to Bot your way to Fake News Success9/12The “Callback URL” field, however, is important. The value that goes here is generatedby your spreadsheet, so go back to your Setup  sheet and find the yellow cell with thecallback URL for your sheet:Note: Your character string will be different from mine. Also, the URL is quite long and itextends past the right edge of the cell.Copy and paste the Callback URL into your Twitter App. As you do, make sure you don’taccidentally copy the cell formatting, since this will add a space character to the end ofURL, which will lead Twitter to reject it. Instead, double-click the cell to select just thetext of the Callback URL value.Double-check it all, agree to the Developer Agreement, and Create Your TwitterApplication.Tiny Flashing Thumbs: How to Bot your way to Fake News Success10/12Did you remember to verify your account and add a phone number way back at thebeginning of this tutorial? If not you probably got an error message along those lines.PermissionsUnder the “Permissions” tab of your App’s settings, double-check that its set to “Readand Write.” If not, make that change now, and wait a few minutes before proceeding.Sometimes it takes Twitter a few minutes to update your App’s permissions, and if youauthorize before that update happens it will still use the original, read-only permissions.Keys and Access TokensYou need two values from the “Keys and Access Tokens” tab, the “Consumer Key (APIKey),” and the “Consumer Secret (API Secret)”:Mine are blurred out so you can’t steal them.For both of these values, copy and paste them back into your Spreadsheet’s Setup  sheet,in the green cells under step 3. Like with the Callback URL, make sure you don’taccidentally copy formatting, because this will add extra space to the value here and itwon’t work.Send a Test TweetThis function creates the other half of the OAuth connection between your SSBot andTwitter, and if it works, it will tweet on your behalf. Double-check your app’s permissionsand the Key and Secret values, and run “Send a Test Tweet” from the Bot Menu.The first time you run this function, you’ll see a modal popup window prompting you tofollow a link to authorize. This will take you Twitter where you can authorize your Appto tweet on your behalf, and then once it’s all done, you’ll see a “Success! You can closethis page” message. Run “Send a Test Tweet” one more time, and you should see it onTiny Flashing Thumbs: How to Bot your way to Fake News Success11/12your Twitter account’s timeline. If not, then it’s time for troubleshooting, which will bethe next section.Start Posting TweetsIf everything looks good, check your Settings , especially your Timing, and run “StartPosting Tweets” from the Bot Menu.And now you have a bot!Successful tweets and errors reported back from Twitter are logged in the logs  sheet(the one with the black border, all the way to the right.)Common Errors and TroubleshootingSometimes things go wrong, and that’s OK. Here are a few of those things and what todo about them.The Twitter App says my Callback URL is an “invalid URL”An “invalid URL” is one that doesn’t start with http://  or that includes characters thataren’t allowed for URLs like whitespace or hard returns. It’s easy to accidentally paste theURL with an extra space at the beginning or end, and that’s usually what generates thiserror. So double-check that URL you pasted.Error starting OAuth flow: {“errors”:[{“code”:32,”message”:”Could notauthenticate you.”}]}If you get this in a red popup message when you try to send that first test tweet, it usuallymeans that your Consumer Key / Consumer Secret were incorrect. It could also meanthat your Twitter App is invalid for some reason. Again, double-check all those values.“App is Read-Only”You’ll see this in the log  sheet if your App has the wrong permissions, i.e. it doesn’t have“write” permissions. To fix this, obviously, your first action should be to change thosesettings in the app. You’ll have to re-authorize your sheet as well, so “Revoke TwitterAuthorization” from the Bot Menu and go through the “Send A Test Tweet” sequenceagain.Tiny Flashing Thumbs: How to Bot your way to Fake News Success12/12TypeError: Cannot call method “replace” of undefined.You’ll get this message when you’re using the markov  or _ebooks  constructors and thechaining algorithm finds that it doesn’t have enough data to work with. This is not a verynuanced Markov implementation, so I’ve made several assumptions in order to simplifythings, and one of those assumptions is that the text you’re feeding it has completesentences starting with capital letters. Therefore, a source text that lacks capital letterswill generate this error. If you’d like to bypass this assumption, you can change one lineof code. Go to “Tools -> Script Editor…” to make changes to your spreadsheet’s code,and look for line 205. It should read like this:if (/[A-ZА-Я]/.test(txt[i][0])){To allow it to build strings from lower-case words, edit it to read like this:if (/[a-zA-ZА-Я]/.test(txt[i][0])){Of course, this change will have an impact on the coherence of the output, but maybethat’s a good thing.Other Errors?I’m moving this project into GitHub, so please post any issues you have in the issuestracker for my SSBot repository.Thanks to Mark C. Marino. 

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