A Twitter bot is watching all of your mistakes—or at least the ones that are trending
Every tweet is a mistake, but some tweets are better mistakes than others. Now there’s a bot to help you find some of the happy accidents.
Fuzzy Trends is a Twitter bot created by Sarah McDonald. Its job is pretty straightforward: find and retweet tweets that misspell trending hashtags.
- NBC Seems to Suggest a Children's Video Game is to Blame for UnitedHealthcare CEO's Killing
- Possible United HealthCare CEO Killer Caught, Had Manifesto Criticizing Profits Over Care
- Nancy Mace Is an Irredeemable Garbage Person Who Loves Bullying Vulnerable People and Yet the Media Still Believes Her
The bot came about, McDonald told me over email, because she wanted to make a bot that would “retweet funny things without offending anyone.” She added, “Everyone makes typos so it’s not singling anyone out.”
McDonald’s bot isn’t the first to draw humor from out of context tweets. Accounts like Pentametron (which, as its name suggests, retweets tweets that are in iambic pentameter, unwittingly or otherwise) trade on unintended linguistic features.
Fuzzy Trends is trading in explicit mistakes, but it isn’t meant to be mocking. As McDonald puts it, “The funniest tweets are when the typo is a result of the sheer enthusiasm of the tweeter.”
https://twitter.com/cheekyhesx/status/637783710394355712
There’s room for interpretation there, but it feels like a refreshing perspective. At the risk of getting into some fairly hokey ~mistakes are wonderful~ territory, it’s nice to see a bot that puts light ribbing and celebrating enthusiasm hand in hand.
Ethan Chiel is a reporter for Fusion, writing mostly about the internet and technology. You can (and should) email him at [email protected]