monitoring when journalists request permission to broadcast videos from twitter
Tag: bots
And of course, just as I’m checking this tool out, I encounter a shooting in New Jersey that makes one of the bigger stories of the day.

If you’ve ever looked at the replies on any newsworthy amateur video posted to Twitter, you’ll see an inevitable chorus of news organizations and broadcast journalists in the replies, usually asking two questions:
- Did you shoot this video?
- Can we use it on all our platforms, affiliates, etc with credit?
That gave me an idea, which I posted to Twitter.
I bet you could make a great breaking news site that just monitors this Twitter search of media properties asking for permission to broadcast user videos, and scoops them by automatically posting the most active videos. https://t.co/xP3160ezHQ
— Andy Baio (@waxpancake) August 1, 2019Within two days, a talented developer named Corey Johnson made it real by launching Bbbreaking News.
👓 How Much of the Internet Is Fake? | NY Magazine | Intelligencer
Turns out, a lot of it, actually.
👓 Who says neuroscientists don’t need more brains? Annotation with SciBot | Hypothesis
You might think that neuroscientists already have enough brains, but apparently not. Over 100 neuroscientists attending the recent annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience (SFN), took part in an annotation challenge: modifying scientific papers to add simple references that automatically generate and attach Hypothesis annotations, filled with key related information. To sweeten the pot, our friends at Gigascience gave researchers who annotated their own papers their very own brain hats.
I suspect I’m missing some context, but taking a stab: the bots are hoping you’ll accept/approve their replies so that you put their links on your page for future clicks as well as SEO purposes. Like most spam operations, they just need an ~2% response rate to make the few cents that make doing this worthwhile. I personally blacklist some of the worst offenders by domain name, IP address, or judicious keywords.
How many people does it take to make a campaign trend? We dug into the numbers.
👓 The botnet cometh | PushPullFork
This morning, I woke up to several hundred notifications on Twitter. But these weren't your regular spam.