Botopoly

Our team crafted a Twitter-bot board game for visitors to play at the DSS January 2020 Showcase

In order to illustrate the function of our bot and the ethical and technical challenges we faced during development, we created a board game for attendees of our showcase to play.

The most compelling part of the game is the ‘ambiguous’ card deck, which contains examples of contentious abuse taken directly from Twitter.

A player has drawn an ambiguous card. It says “go fuck yourself you wizened old harpy.” This tweet is insulting. But Is it abusive?

These examples of abuse provoke a conversation about who has the authority to determine when something is abusive, and about how the changing contexts and perspectives of both abusers, victims and spectators can influence our individual definitions of abuse.