| Hey all, it's Kurt. I've spent most of the last three years thinking that bots on social media are a bad thing. Can you blame me? Companies like Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. routinely announce how many bots they remove for safety and security reasons, and a lot of election and harassment problems seem to tie back to bots in some shape or form. But I've had a change of heart in recent weeks. Put simply: All of these vaccine bots seem So. Darn. Helpful. Vaccine bots have cropped up to help people find Covid-19 vaccine appointments, and a quick search on Twitter shows how widespread they've become. There are bots for Colorado, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. A guy behind a popular NY vaccine bot called @TurboVax got a New York Times profile and a shout-out from Andrew Yang. In California, there is a different bot for every major metro area, including San Diego, Los Angeles and the Bay Area. Omar Darwish, a cybersecurity engineer, is behind the @CovidVaccineCA, which tweets out open appointments as they become available on the state's website. Darwish built the bot after seeing how difficult it was for his mother and grandmother to get appointments in their home state of Texas. "I'd like to imagine there are a lot more people being helped than I know about," he said. It turns out there are a lot of fun and helpful bots out there that have nothing to do with vaccines. There are bots that track earthquakes, court filings, and even a bot to track Elon Musk's private jet. There are quirky bots too, like one that will insult you in the way you might imagine President Joe Biden would ("You bellyachin' ninny-hammer"). Andrei Taraschuk is behind almost 500 different Twitter bots that tweet out artwork from famous painters like Wassily Kandinsky and Jackson Pollock, a collection of accounts he says generates 220 million impressions per month and costs hundreds of dollars in server and other infrastructure costs to maintain. Taraschuk runs the accounts with a co-founder, Cody Braun, as a way to expose people to art, but says that the perception around bots hasn't changed a lot since he started the project in 2014. "The narrative is negative and I do think it needs to change," he says. "When I first started doing it I didn't even wanna say that I build bots because right away these red flags would come up for people." There's also the challenge of getting your bot through Twitter's automated systems. As social media companies have come under more pressure to police their services, crackdowns on automated accounts have gone up—sometimes catching the "good guys" on accident. Taraschuk says his whole network of art bots was removed after the 2016 elections, forcing him to go to Twitter to get them reinstated. Maria Lee has also had issues. A creative director at an advertising company, Lee started a bot last year to counter violent rhetoric targeted at Asians because of the coronavirus. Her bot, @Respond2Racism, automatically tweets at people who use offensive language or hashtags, warning people that their language is spreading xenophobia. But even a bot intended to clean up Twitter ran into problems with its filters, she says. Lee had to tinker with her bot's timing and messaging before it could operate. "There needs to be some sort of collaborative effort for the positive ones like ours," she says. That could happen. Twitter is looking into ways to label bots more clearly so that people will know what they are interacting with—a strategy that could open the door for more bots down the line. As far as I'm concerned, that seems like a fun idea. —Kurt Wagner | 
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