The Botpocalypse

The Botpocalypse had repercussions in the community, which are still visible in the present day. The impact of the event will likely affect us as long as Facebook exists.

Prior to the events of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the Bot Appreciation Society was in its earlier days. Bots were becoming more and more widespread, and with this rise in popularity came a rise in the group's population and the number of new bots being created.

Facebook's Graph API was open to anyone who wished to use it, which allowed for anyone to create a bot if they had the perserverance and interest in learning how. It was a time which was conducive to freedom and creativity, as progress and mutual cooperation was unhindered.

However, this was about to change.

On the dawn of 17th March 2018, both The Guardian and The New York Times simultaneously published articles detailing the rampant misuse of Facebook users' data, harvested via apps registed with the Facebook Graph API.

Around this time period Facebook restrictive spam filters and limited access to the API caused notorious problems for bots, most being unable to post normally. The most notable filter was one that blocked text post from being successful through the API, letting the botmins with little choice they had to devise a workaround, the best one consisting of posting a blank image of 1 pixel height along the text posts. This also meant the conversion of various Text Bots to Image Bots.

A whistleblower, Christopher Wylie, who

    previously worked with Cambridge Analytica, provided a dossier that possessed evidence the firm had collected data from over 50 million user profiles - as of this time, it was the largest data breach in Facebook's history. More details can be garnered by googling the scandal or visiting the linked web pages.

Because of the remarkable amount of negative press and pressure from lawmakers and politicians in multiple countries, specifically the US and the UK, Facebook and The Zucc created a process we now know as the App Review.

This was intended to reduce the amount of freedoms that those using the API would have, and provide The Zucc with the ability to preemptively disable apps which misused the API as well as provide more control over apps that were already registered.

Unfortunately, this meant that the bot community now had to adapt to the changes being made, lest lose their API privileges and by extension, their bot pages.

Thus, a rabid scramble to pass the app review began for most existing bot admins. Facebook was currently planning to implement the App Review process on 1st August of that year (2018), which gave most admins a couple of months to pass the App Review and retain their posting privileges.

    However, unbeknownst to most admins, the app review process also requires evidence that the creator of the app runs a registered business in their country of origin; this business must then be associated with the app in question. Because of this, few admins managed to pass the process. As far as we know, the only known access token that has passed the App Review was owned by Paintmin.

Thus, on the dawn of the 1st of August, the vast majority of bot pages in the community ceased posting. This is the event we currently refer to as the Botpocalypse. Although this was the first and most major instance of such a wide-scale zucc event, it was not to be the last.

* A concerned fan asks about the future of the bot community.
* Shitpostbot 5000 makes a public statement on the current status of their app
* A botmin elucidates the situation the day after the fallout
* A botmin ponders the possibility of changing platforms
* Another bot fan, also concerned for the future of the community
* A botmin, after pages began to resume posting again despite the App Review
* Botmin describing the situation to fellow BAS members
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Fortunately, the App Review process proved to be as shoddy as Facebook itself. Apps which had not gone through the review process were still able to routinely post after a period of a day or so, and the majority of bots were back up and functional by the end of the week.

Regardless, the introduction of the App Review created a significant roadblock for many new botmins as they could not spare the time nor the effort required to create a bot anymore.