Bots are great for helping to automate and complete tasks for those who might be too busy to do it themselves. For example we’ve seen how gamers have relied on bots to help them farm for content in video games, but it’s all fun and games until someone gets arrested when a bot goes rogue.
According to Twitter user Jeffry van der Goot, he claims to have been questioned by the police when his Twitter bot apparently made death threats via its account. According to van der Goot, he explains that his bot works by taking random words from his feed, jumbles them up and turns them into coherent sentences which are then published as new tweets.
However it seems that one of the tweets ended up being a death threat of sorts that was serious enough to involve the police as it involved threats against an upcoming event that was taking place in Amsterdam where van der Goot is based in as a developer.. He states that he can’t blame the police for getting involved as they should with all death threats, but we have to imagine that it would take a fair amount of convincing for them to believe that it was a bot, and not van der Goot himself, who made those threats.
Van der Goot claims that the police told him that he’s responsible since the bot is his and it is under his name and has used his words. Declining to identify the bot, the developer has since deleted his Twitter bot’s account after the incident at the request of the police.
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