Botting for Freedom

Sample Tweets from our Twitter Bot Profile

Inspiration

We are passionate about keeping the internet free and are frightened at the possibility of net neutrality being overturned by the current FCC Chairman. We wanted to come up with the quickest way to make a direct impact on influencing politicians, and we realized that social media would give us that opportunity. Thus arose Botting for Freedom.

What it does

This bot directly contacts and replies to US representatives, congressmen and congresswomen, and other politicians, advocating for Net Neutrality.

How we built it

We used NodeJS and its plenitude of modules from NPM to create the bot logic, interfacing with the Twitter API to allow our bot to interact with politicians. We hosted this bot on Heroku so that it could contact politicians on a regular interval for as long as we feel Net Neutrality is in danger.

Challenges we ran into

Understanding the Twitter API documentation was a pain. Getting the server to not idle or crash and constantly be running also took a long time to figure out.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

It works! It actually tweets politicians and we know that these politicians are notified directly and able to see our calls for holding on to Net Neutrality.