#stealthmountain

Since things are winding down for the holidays I thought I would just share something fun today. As many of you know, I manage the Twitter account for the Monterey Institute of International Studies (@MIIS). It is one of my favorite things about my job. Of course, I always double, triple, even quadruple check my content for typos before posting. Well, today I accidentally published a typo, but the resulting discovery was a fun surprise:

Meet Stealth Mountain: 

Stealth Mountain tells users who have tweeted “sneak peak” that they have used the expression improperly, and suggests that they meant to write “sneak peek.”

Every two minutes, the bot searches for the most recent tweet containing the phrase “sneak peak,” and replies to the tweet with “I think you mean ‘sneak peek’”.

The main audience for the bot is the users it contacts. Many users, when notified of their error, reply to the bot, and the nature of the replies varies. The most common replies are a simple “thank you”, excuses for making the error, enraged attacks or dismissals, and laughter.

Though the bot has over 20,000 followers, its only tweets are @-replies to users, so followers will only see the bot’s tweet if it contacts them or a user whom they follow.