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Mixed in with the celebrities and journalists (ugh, right?), there are a lot of delightful novelty accounts on Twitter. Here’s a new one you should check out.
It’s called @ThinkpieceBot. Those of you who spend a lot of time online can probably guess what it does. Designed by Nora Reed using a free online tool, the account periodically tweets out fake sensational headlines for “thinkpieces” that you might find in media outlets like Salon, the Atlantic or the Guardian.
So, for example, “How Magnets Can Ruin Your Relationship.” Or, “Are the Muppets Why Millennials Won’t Vote?” Or my personal favorite:
https://twitter.com/thinkpiecebot/status/639364973563613184
“I’m really, really sick of the columns and articles from cisgender, hetero white Boomer men with Important Opinions About Millennials who don’t have any idea what they are talking about,” Reed said via email. “It drives me up a wall that news outlets keep paying these ignorant people to explain groups they aren’t a part of. Folks who are actually members of the groups in question should be getting those gigs.”
@ThinkpieceBot runs all day and night, automatically tweeting new mashed-up headlines based on ideas fed into a library by Reed. She said she initially built this library over a weekend out of submissions from her Twitter followers, but she has found reasons to keep adding to the bot since it launched in late August.
“It turns out that even though I should’ve single-handedly made thinkpieces so mockable that everyone immediately stopped writing them, the world doesn’t work that way,” she said. “So new subjects keep coming up that I add to its vocabulary.”
Reed’s other Twitter bots include @man_products, which satirizes macho marketing (“Punch Your Testosterone”) and @LikeUberBut, an Uber-for-X generator with some ideas that are no worse than much of what gets funded on Sand Hill Road (“like Facebook, but for pigeons”). In addition to her non-bot-making work as a writer, she said she supports the Twitter accounts through online donations.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
