Can a #BlackLivesMatter Twitter bot support activism and silence trolls?

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/22/blacklivesmatter-twitter-bot-activism-trolls

Version 0 of 1.

Right now, @StayWokeBot generates doggerel, little poems comparing Twitter users to significant black leaders. But developers Courtney Stanton and Darius Kazemi (who, full disclosure, I know personally) have big ambitions for the little bot, which they created for the #BlackLivesMatter activist group We the Protestors to use. Eventually, it could become one of the organization’s most invaluable digital tools.

Most Twitter bots don’t exist to do a job. They serve purposes, for sure – they are funny or beautiful or thought-provoking, they recontextualize the news or invent moths or make card games or put you in a Hogwarts house. They make Twitter better, or at least more tolerable. But they exist in the realm of art: they create a niche, then fill it. They don’t take over work that a person would otherwise have to do.

StayWokeBot is different. It will eventually take over for We the Protestors members the job of fielding predictable, endless questions, challenges and bait. Anyone who’s politically vocal online, especially about a topic like police violence against black people, is likely deluged by uninformed onlookers seeking at best education, at worst a fight. Soon, organization members with access to @StayWokeBot will be able to loop it into conversations and let it handle these lines of questioning. The bot will have a database of answers and sources for the most frequent questions (and attempted derails), thus freeing up activists to get on with their work rather than spending hours repeating themselves in 140-character increments.

Stanton and Kazemi are limiting who can call on the bot’s services to keep it from tweeting enough to land in “Twitter jail”, an enforced tweet time-out, and to keep people from finding other ways to abuse it. But keeping close hold on StayWokeBot’s use also restricts its usefulness. There may be other approaches that are more open-access – and less protected – and I hope we see those implemented too, on a range of topics. A widely-available 101 bot would be a boon for activists, or casual advocates, on a number of different issues. In fact, it might be crucial.

In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the novel that inspired the film Blade Runner, science fiction writer Philip K. Dick introduces the notion of “kipple.” Kipple is junk – clutter, basic life detritus –that reproduces itself and drives away non-kipple. Let it stand for too long, and not only does it monopolize all your space and energy and time, it also pushes things of importance out of your life.

For an activist, the low-level emotional and explanatory work – troll-fighting, assessing the motives of the argumentative, dumbing things down, hand-holding others through 101 discussions they’ve had a million times – is essentially kipple. If you indulge it, it proliferates; the moderately patient are besieged by bad-faith arguers. And it pushes non-kipple to the side.

Twitter nags can drain so much of an activist’s time and energy that she has little left for work that moves her cause forward. The clueless or stubborn or merely annoying antagonists, the ones who are never going to send a death threat or a pizza or a SWAT team to your house, are still dangerous. They’re dangerous because they can nibble a cause to death.

A well-executed kipple bot – and there’s little doubt that @StayWokeBot will be well-executed – might be able to clear away enough of the energy-draining day-to-day social media work that the activists who use it have time for more and greater accomplishments. The #BlackLivesMatter movement has already been astonishingly influential and important; how much more could they do without the drag of defending basic principles to the ignorant, the dishonest and the mean? Thanks to a robot, maybe we can find out.