EDMONTON—Twitter bots are often annoying trolls that pose as real people and spam your timeline with unnecessary tweets.

ParityBOT does not claim to be human, but it will restore your faith in humanity.

Created by Edmontonian Lana Cuthbertson, past chair of ParityYEG, an initiative created to support and inspire more women to enter politics, the bot detects abusive tweets directed at female candidates running in elections, then sends out a positive tweet on its account.

Although the tweet is not directed to a candidate — as in it does not name the candidate or appear under the offensive tweet posted due to spamming concerns and Twitter rules — Cuthbertson hopes candidates will see the tweets either by following the account or by having their followers retweet the messages.

The idea is to counterbalance the toxic energy on the platform as a whole with the mere presence of positive and uplifting tweets like “You are stronger than you know!” “Keep fighting!” or inspirational quotes from famous personalities.

The messages are crowdsourced from the public on a website tweeted out by ParityBOT on its account.

ParityBOT ran during the course of Alberta’s provincial election, from March 19 until April 18. The bot launched again on Sept. 23 to make the experience of female candidates running in the federal election slightly less traumatic.

“Our system tends to pick up on things like swear words, gendered language. We have set a threshold that a tweet has to reach … to be considered abusive and tweet something out in response,” Cuthbertson said.

The bot was created using machine-learning analysis models, which allows it to analyze short snippets of text over multiple features, such as harmful words, derogatory terms and sexual language. If the toxicity level of the tweet is above its threshold, ParityBOT will post a positive tweet.

According to research done in 2019 by researchers at the University of Toronto, which analyzed 2.2 million messages addressed to Canadian politicians and American senators on Twitter, 8.6 per cent of messages sent to female politicians were uncivil, as in hate-fuelled. Although men received more uncivil messages — 11.7 per cent — the research does point out that it gets worse for women as they become more prominent.

In Canada, prominent female politicians like Liberal MP Maryam Monsef, former Ontario premier Kathleen Wynne, and former Alberta premier Rachel Notley received a disproportionate number of uncivil messages compared to other prominent male politicians.

During the provincial election, ParityBOT processed 12,726 tweets directed at all 54 nominated female candidates. Out of these, the bot detected 7.7 per cent of the tweets to be above its threshold of toxic — as in the abusive language contained more than a few harmful, derogatory and sexual words.

In response, the account tweeted 973 “positivitweets,” as Cuthbertson calls them. Since the beginning of the federal election campaign, the bot has now tweeted 1,075 times.

ParityBOT is also only allowed to post a maximum of 10 tweets each hour in order to avoid overwhelming the system.

Cuthbertson said for now, they don’t post the positive tweets directly as replies to the negative tweets because they wanted to avoid a scenario “where ill-intentioned people would discover how to game the bot and use it to spam individuals.”

“Second, there are some guidelines that Twitter has around bots, and it is more risky to create a Twitter bot if you mention specific individuals,” she said.

Cuthbertson admits the project is still in its early stages. “It’s not perfect yet, by any means,” she said, adding they are currently working on measuring ParityBOT’s influence.

“A big part of this project is trying to find out whether or not this bot is having an impact on women candidates, and women in general who are publicly engaged and thinking ... they might want to run for office,” she said.

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They plan to conduct interviews with candidates, gather feedback and do some surveys to find out if ParityBOT is making a difference.

“If it is, we can use it more often to help more women decide (if) they want to run for office and also just help make politics a more positive experience for women,” Cuthbertson said.

The bot itself was created using artificial intelligence and machine learning, but submitting the accounts of all the candidates was a manual job performed by volunteers. Cuthbertson said they used about five volunteers to collect the names and Twitter accounts for candidates during the provincial election and had 10 volunteers for the federal campaign.

However, even with more volunteers, it took five times longer to gather the information of female candidates from across Canada.

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