A bot on Twitter is apportion images of all 212 immigration detention eye along with the speech and demographic information of each location , tossing frigid , hard fact into the heated online debate over immigration in America .
Artist Everest Pipkin make the bot,@Abolish_ICE_Now , on Friday , about two months after Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the “ zero allowance ” policy that has resulted in U.S. Border Patrol agentsseparating thousands of undocumented minor from their parents — an ineffably roughshod policy child health forethought professionals have characterized as “ a form of child abuse . ”
https://twitter.com/embed/status/1011616041984667655
The tweets alone appear relatively pain pill , including details like the facilities ’ last inspection rating , the city population , the median household income , medium temperature , and nearby schools . But as Pipkin pointed out on Twitter , “ This bot should n’t exist . ” They continued :
“ ICE should n’t subsist . prison house should n’t be . But perhaps we should see them , situated inside of communities where many people survive , oeuvre , go to school , and have normal lives . Not everyone near a poky has the power to resist captivity ( physically or otherwise ) , and prisons are often strategically locate in miserable or historically - repressed community of interests . But for us that do — we have ability where we survive . We need to use it . These are our neighbors . ”
Pipkin told Gizmodo in an email that they used to make art bots , such as @mothgenerator and @tiny_star_field , but it ’s been a while since they make a Twitter bot , impute the hiatus to Twitter ’s terms of service , which “ have allowed white - patriot , the far good , and sometimes literal Nazis to inhabit a blank on the weapons platform as long as they do n’t foil the very specific line mentioned in the policy , ” they said . “ I still use the service myself , but feel uncomfortable making work for the program . Those artistry bot do n’t reserve a political stance ( even if I do ) and that just is n’t good enough powerful now . ”
The dataset for the Immigration Detentions Facilities Bot was scraped from the Freedom for Immigrants detention statistic map , according to Pipkin , along with demographic and census information for the cities . The addresses of each facility are course into their API , and look-alike are draw from Google Maps , Street View , and Places . Pipkin enunciate that the initial motivation behind grate the data was a “ simply civic routine ” to provide activists easygoing access to the entropy . Pipkin said they design to lend more context to the bot , reflecting the motion of those detained as well as modification in legislation .
Bots are n’t typically view as vehicles for objection — they are largely associate with merciless floods of spam , from the innocuous tonefariously deceptive . But @Abolish_ICE_Now betoken a way in which automatise the bed covering of selective information can offer a crucial lens into a deep troubling political moment . And since it ’s information - driven and , well , a bot , it is innocent of emotion and focused all on facts , provide footling ammo for trolls while give the rest of us a utile pecker .
“ Bots of article of faith are based in data , which is another way of saying they do n’t make this shit up , ” Associate Professor of Digital Studies at Davidson College Mark Samplewrote on Medium in 2014 . “ They draw from inquiry , statistics , spreadsheets , databases . bot have no subconscious , so any imaging they expend should be taken literally . Protest bot give witness to the world we inhabit . ”
matter THAT ARE PROTEST BOTS;bots that perforate deeply upbots that take action to help othersANY bot made by marginalized someone , specially those who experience barrier in techbots that operate against twitter ’s methodology of hyper - pace data service ( maintenance bots , etc )
— everest ( @everestpipkin)June 23 , 2018
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