I created the original factbot1 as a twitterbot in 2014.
Remember 2014? It was quite a different time, before the pandemic, Brexit and Trump.
In fact Trump indirectly inspired the creation of the original bot. At that point in time he was merely an annoying reality television personality with an obsession with Obama’s birth certificate. His propensity for telling lies to the gullible was notable even then, though at the time we had no idea how that was going to turn out…
Back then Twitter was still fun, although it was beginning to become polluted with misinformation and lies. Who would have thought that a hugely popular hub of algorithmically determined information could be misused to create outrage and division and an industrial scale?!
In due course, Elon got involved, borrowed a lot of money from people like Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, and Twitter became X and all the nice people left.
@factbot1 last posted in 2021.
Back in the day the bot did quite well on Twitter, but it really came into its own on Tumblr. It seems the absurdity of fake-facts is particularly appealing the the Tumblr-demographic, with this particular post gaining almost legendary status.
And even though it stopped posting 5 years ago, it seems to still have a life beyond the grave. My daughter recently sent me a factbot post (with attribution removed, natch) doing the rounds on Instagram.
It seems there is still an appetite for this nonsense bot, which pleases me immensely.
So I have decided to resurrect it. It is still producing facts based around the original templates, but I took the liberty of updating its lists of ‘notable people’, since the world of celebrity has moved on a bit in the last decade…
You can find @factbot1 posting on tumblr and bluesky.
(I was delighted to see a tumblr response appear within seconds of the first post…)
