Culture

Here’s Why 2018’s Most Annoying Twitter Trend Was Almost Definitely Fake

by Joseph Earp  18 December 2018
The 'I Forced A Bot' meme is exceedingly annoying

Want more Junkee in your life? Sign up to our newsletter, and follow us on Instagram and Facebook so you always know where to find us.

Twitter is mostly a hell-site, populated by celebrities and regular folk alike, all of whom are far, far too online.

But if there’s one thing about the site in 2018 that made it even more irritating than usual, it was the trend of ‘I Forced A Bot To Watch’ tweets that spread across the platform like the world’s most befuddling digital wildfire.

You probably know the kind of tweets that I’m talking about, but if you’re one of the lucky uninitiated, here’s a little taster for you:

The tweets follow a very recognisable formula. Basically, they adopt the non-sequitur laden voice of a confused, overloaded bot. The humour comes from strange leaps in logic, repetition of mundane words, and the occasional, overly portentous threat.

The tweets are everywhere, but one user who has garnered particular attention for them is a comedian named Keaton Patti, who churned out a huge number of the things over the course of the year, collecting a bevy of followers and retweets in the process.

But they’re also almost definitely fake, and here’s why.

To illustrate, let’s take one example in particular, Patti’s most popular ‘I Forced A Bot’ tweet, a commercial for the US food chain Olive Garden supposedly written by a bot:

Here’s how the ‘commercial’ starts:

“A group of friends laughs at a dinner table. A WAITRESS comes to deliver what could be considered food.”

Now here’s the thing: bots work on word repetition. You ‘force a bot to watch’ adverts by feeding it scripts. It then looks at the frequency of words in those scripts, and it spits out its own word salad, most of which is utter nonsense.

Not only is Patti’s tweet nonsense, it also features words that you’d never find in an Olive Garden commercial. When would you ever hear the word ‘considered’ in a commercial? Or the word ‘secret’, which occurs later on?

Then there are the two-part, layered jokes that occur in Patti’s tweet. Let’s look at one in particular:

“We see the unlimited stick. It is infinite. It is all.”

For a start, you’d never hear the word ‘infinite’ in an Olive Garden commercial. But more than that, those three sentences are funny because they build off each other. They make logical sense next to one another, and they culminate in the punchline of ‘is all’. No bot, no matter how sophisticated it might be, could string together sentences like that.

Bots can barely string together complete sentences at the best of times, let alone three of them in a row, let alone three that actually work on each other.

Then, finally, there’s maybe the most damning hint that this whole thing is utterly fake. In his tweet, Patti says he forced a bot to watch 1,000 hours of Olive Garden commercials. Now, Olive Garden commercials tend to be about 30 seconds long. That means Patti must have somehow sourced 120,000 Olive Garden commercials.

Let’s keep going with this. Olive Garden has been around for 36 years. That means for them to have produced enough commercials for Patti to feed his bot, it has to have been producing Olive Garden commercials at the rate of 3,333 a year, or 64 a week, or 9 a day.

And here’s the thing: I do not believe that Olive Garden has been producing commercials at the rate of 64 a week since 1982, but just to make sure, I messaged the Olive Garden twitter page.

Olive Garden are yet to comment

Olive Garden are yet to reply.

Listen, this isn’t some attack on Patti, a comedian who is just trying to get by (aren’t we all!), using a platform that can help emerging creatives find their audience. Ya gotta do what ya gotta do.

But boy oh boy would it be nice if we all held hands, and stepped together into the bright and shining possibilities of 2019 completely and utterly ‘I Forced A Bot’ free.