A stylized robot face made of the letters F and T.
 

Stay Woke Bot

An image of a black man's fist raised.

Brief

Stay Woke Bot is a Twitter bot that runs off a Google Sheet so the activists who use it can adapt the bot to their needs as their social media strategies change. For a complete description of the project, see our blog post.

Implementation

In order to allow activists who are not computer programmers to customize their bot's behavior, we decided to drive the bot on Google Spreadsheets. This has an API that can expose the data in a spreadsheet in a machine-consumable format. We're using google-spreadsheet for Node.js. By having the bot pull live data from a spreadsheet, multiple activists can edit the bot's behavior from anywhere in the world, even from their phones using the standard Google Drive apps.

The full source code is available on Github.

Post Mortem

This was covered in many major media outlets including The Washington Post and Fusion. We'd say more here but you'll probably just want to see our blog post for all our thoughts!

 

The content of this article is provided under a CC-BY Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.