Twitter has been working on a bot flagging feature since September of last year, and it appears as though the feature is going live today.
Back in September, the micro-blogging platform announced that the feature had been rolled out to select developer accounts, allowing them to apply labels to indicate whether a tweet has been automated by a ‘good bot’ or not.
What's a bot and what's not? We're making it easier to identify #GoodBots and their automated Tweets with new labels.
Starting today, we’re testing these labels to give you more context about who you're interacting with on Twitter. pic.twitter.com/gnN5jVU3pp
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) September 9, 2021
According to the San Francisco, California-based social company, “automated accounts you might see on Twitter include bots that help you find vaccine appointments and disaster early warning systems.” Having a label on such accounts gives other (human) users a better understanding of the bot’s purpose.
At the time, the feature had been rolled out to about 500 developers, but starting today, anyone operating a bot account can add the label to its tweets.
Get your bots in here! Remember when we chatted about all things, #GoodBots? Well now we are celebrating the bots who make a positive contribution to Twitter, all over the world. pic.twitter.com/e1OqJjRZiG
— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) February 16, 2022
The feature comes after Twitter stated last year that high-quality bot accounts must self-identify as such. It said at the time that developers must clearly indicate if an account is a bot and identify the person operating the account.
In other Twitter-related news, the company is currently testing out a YouTube-like video playback speed feature for Android and Web. Read more about it here.
Image credit: @TwitterSupport
Source: @TwitterSafery
