Caitlyn Jenner: Twitter bot created to remind social media users to use the right pronouns
'She not he' account has spent hours automatically telling people off — and sometimes getting it wrong
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Your support makes all the difference.A Twitter bot has been created to ensure that people refer to Caitlyn Jenner using the right pronoun following her high-profile transition.
The account, @she_not_he, sends public tweets to those it detects have used the male pronoun.
The bot has mostly spent its time shouting at and outing people who misgender Jenner, either by mistake or maliciousness. But since it only looks for tweets that contain both the words “he” and “Jenner”, it’s already made a number of mistakes.
It told off a person who sent a tweet saying “If I see u call Caitlyn Jenner ‘he’ or ‘Bruce’ I will hate you forever”, for instance.
As well as responding to tweets that contain uses of “he” unrelated to Caitlyn, the bot also picks up completely unrelated tweets about other Jenners like Caitlyn’s daughters Kyle and Kendall.
The bot’s bio makes clear that it’s a robot and as such is likely to make mistakes: “I am a bot politely correcting Twitter users who misgender Caitlyn Jenner in their tweets. I might make mistakes reading your tweet!! I'm only human. (Not.)”
The account began by quoting the problem tweets, writing a person’s user name and telling them “It’s she, not he. Thanks!” It now just responds with replies to the tweets, leaving a dot in front of the name so that anyone following the account can see all of the people that have been called out.
Anyone can make such a bot account, feeding it certain pieces of code that will then tell it how to tweet and what to look for. A similar account called "Grammar Police" has been established for some time, for instance, which picks up mistakes and then tells of those who make them.
The account has so far only picked up 738 followers, despite sending out over 1,000 tweets in the time it’s been around. That’s likely because it sends out so many public tweets — following the account means seeing a new tweet from it many times a minute.
That’s a marked difference from Jenner herself, who beat the record for the quickest person to get to 1 million followers and is already close to 2 million.
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