Twitter has rolling out announced a new feature that will allow accounts to identify themselves as bots by adding a label on their profile. Twitter stated that the update was based upon research that revealed that its users wanted greater context on non-human accounts.

The company also provided several examples of “good robots”, including accounts that share vaccine updates, information on seismic activity, and material from public museums.

It is however not mandatory to move, Twitter said. The company will continue to delete inauthentic accounts that it believes violate its platform rules, it added.

Bots are frequently associated with misinformation on social networking platforms, which can cause major headaches for companies.

Carnegie Mellon University’s last year study found that almost half of all Twitter accounts posting messages about the coronavirus pandemic on social media platforms were likely to have been generated by automated services.

In recent years, Twitter has removed millions of such bot accounts.

Twitter still considers some automated accounts to have a positive effect on the platform.

Twitter identified one account as a “good robot” that tweets live every time there’s an earthquake in San Francisco. Another such good bot account tweets public domain work from the Drawings & Prints section at New York’s Metropolitan Museum.

This new system had been previewed by Twitter in May and the company is currently trying to provide more information to help people distinguish between automated and human-run accounts.

According to the company, the labels will help increase account legitimacy and create trust with its customers.

Twitter stated that this new feature would initially be rolled out to a limited number of developer accounts while it plans to make the service widely available to all developers by the end of the current year.

It is not yet clear how many automated accounts will accept the offer or whether their owners would like to make it clear that they are not managed by humans.

(Adapted from BBC.com)