@ControlDept: Department of Control’s TwitterBot

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Department of Control’s Twitterbot is a social media subversive, provocative project: a criticism of mainstream media blindness. The program “listens” to some selected twitter accounts, intercepts tweets and composes its own new messages based on the contents of the original ones.

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The program intercepts tweets from the Twitter stream feed – evaluating text according to some statistical properties – then it does a procedural analysis and generation of the text-based data and finally publishes the new computer-generated content on its Twitter account: @ControlDept.

The app publishes “cesored tweets/retweets” but not censored enough, so ending up by spreading, even more, the news that was (supposedly) aiming to cover, failing miserably in doing its job. For example, links and mentioned accounts are often preserved, making it possible for the user to investigate further.

 

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The end result is a thought-provoking, intriguing, stream of original tweets made up of crumbs and pieces of news worth sharing. Given the assumption that forbidden knowledge is appealing, the hope here is: the more you try to censor something online the more popular it becomes.

Department of Control censors news that mainstream media are reluctant to tell, and you should not worry about. Follow at your own risk. 




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