Journalists' Twitter Bot that 'Corrects' People Who Type 'Illegal Immigrant' Suspended from Twitter

ashley.rae | August 5, 2015
DONATE
Font Size

In order to regulate speech, two journalists created a Twitter bot to “correct” people who refer to an individual who is in the country illegally as an “illegal immigrant.” Twitter users, however, did not take kindly to the bot and the account has been suspended as of the afternoon of Aug. 3.

The “'Drop the 'I' Bot” functioned by automatically tweeting at people who used the phrase “illegal immigrant” and prompting them to, instead, use terms such as “undocumented immigrant” or “unauthorized immigrant.” According to the bot, “People aren’t illegal.”


(Image source: Google cache)

The creators of the bot are two journalists at Fusion, Patrick Hogan and Jorge Rivas. In an article praising their creation, Hogan and Rivas explained “why” it is offensive to call an individual an “illegal immigrant”:

“Because, as journalist, filmmaker, and immigration activist Jose Antonio Vargas told us in a recent interview, ‘Actions are illegal. People are not.’ Vargas, who produced the 2013 film ‘Documented’ about his life as an undocumented immigrant, explained that the term ‘illegal immigrant’ is dehumanizing to people who came to the U.S. without proper paperwork.”

Therefore, the bot was spawned to remind people that “in 2015,” using language like “illegal immigrant” is not appropriate (Apparently, the year 2015 is important to the use of language, as Hogan and Rivas mentioned it is 2015 twice in their article.):

“So, in a modest effort to help America shed some of its historical baggage, we built a Twitter bot that replies to some of the people who tweet the words ‘illegal immigrant,’ letting them know that in 2015, the preferred terms are ‘undocumented immigrant’ or ‘unauthorized immigrant.’”

In order to keep the account active, the bot’s creators attempted to bypass Twitter’s spam detectors:

“To avoid spamming people, the bot only runs once every ten minutes, and it never replies to the same user twice.”

Despite actively trying to prevent suspension, the account is currently suspended for violating Twitter’s rules.

Twitter did not respond to MRCTV’s request for comment on the nature of the account’s suspension.

donate