Twitter's Considering a New Checkmark to Highlight Bots on the Platform

This could be interesting - one of the common problems raised with Twitter is the prevalence of bot profiles, non-human Twitter handles which can amplify, manipulate and replicate tweet engagement. This has become particularly problematic in political discussion - last year, Wired reported that bot profiles were dominating political news streams, and amplifying trends, with bot profiles contributing up to 60% of tweet activity around some events. Twitter knows that these bots exist, everyone does. So why does Twitter allow them to keep running? The Wall Street Journal's Joanna Stern recently put this question to Vijaya Gadde, the Legal, Trust, Policy and Safety Lead at Twitter. Of course, there are some bots that are quite helpful. Not the Grammar Police bot - that one can be shut down immediately - but there are some Twitter bots, like those which extract video from tweets, or compile your tweets into more palatable formats, which can be useful, so it makes sense that Twitter doesn't move to just ban all bots entirely.