Two reports are taking an activist pose in the debate surrounding illegal immigration in America.
Fusion.net “journalists” Patrick Hogan and Jorge Rivas created a “Twitter bot” that will automatically tweet to someone who uses the phrase “illegal immigrant” on the social media platform.
When a user tweets the phrase, the account @DroptheIBot will automatically respond to the person, writing, “People aren’t illegal. Try saying ‘undocumented immigrant’ or ‘unauthorized immigrant’ instead.”
The BBC captured several tweets:
The reporters say they created the bot after concluding the phrases “illegal immigrant” and “illegal alien” were “terms that are offensive to people residing in the United States without proper authorization,” Tech Times reports.
” … 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.’ To avoid spamming people, the bot only runs once every ten minutes, and it never replies to the same user twice,” the duo say.
“We see the phrases ‘illegal immigrant’ and ‘illegal alien’ thrown around a lot in policy debates,” Hogan tells the BBC. “It struck us as a very dehumanising way of referring to someone.”
Shortly after Twitter users began receiving unsolicited, auto-created responses from the account, it was suspended.
Twitter bars users from posting “spam” on the site, which the service describes in part as “Abusing the reply or mention functions to post unwanted messages to users.”
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