What news sources does @BBCBweaking use?
The bot takes its news from the “breaking news” tickers from the homepages of several renowned news organisations:
Why do some news stories appear twice?
We send a tweet every time a news organisation updates its feed. This is usually because of a new news story, but occasionally ongoing stories have updates.
In many breaking news scenarios Reuters will send us a very brief message, and then follow it up with a more detailed one as information becomes available. Occasionally, Reuters makes errors and rewords their headline several times. For example, these are four headlines that appeared in quick succession, each getting its own @BBCBweaking tweet:
- 'Once Upon a Time in Hollywood' wins best movie musical or comedy at Golden Globes
- '1917' wins Golden Globes award for best movie drama
- '1917' wins Golden Globe award for best movie drama
- '1917,' 'Once Upon a Time in Hollywood' win top Golden Globes
As we follow multiple news organisations, most major news stories will be reported by more than one newsgatherer. This means that there’s usually more than one tweet for any big story.
Is this an official account?
No. Nobody from Reuters, the BBC, nor Al Jazeera said this was a good idea. We’re followed by someone from the Washington Post, and some journalists from AFP, though!
Who caused this a[bd]o?(mi)?[nr]able account?
The original OWO library was written by @NepetaDev and ported to JavaScript by @zuzakistan, who runs the bot in a personal capacity. The idea for the bot came from a tweet by Ninji in March 2019.
Can I contribute?
Yes. The source code is licenced under the ISC licence. The bot consists of two parts. Newsgathering, parsing, and tweeting takes place via zuzakistan/civilservant. The transformation from English prose to OWO text is done via a library, zuzak/owo.
Report code of conduct issues to conduct@zuzakistan.com.
You can watch a real-time feed of engagements with the bot via IRC on chat.freenode.net ##zuzakistan-feed (webclient).
You can suggest changes without writing code by filling in our Google Form.
How have followers changed over time?
This graph updates daily:
