Modern Problems Require Modern Solution

The past few months have not been great for the world. From the beginning, we have seen disasters taking place one after another ranging from The Australian Bushfire to this deadly Corona Virus, and due to this, countries and their economies have to suffer.

In India, most of the shops were closed for 3 months on a stretch and people were sustaining themself on their savings.E-protest were taking place in the form of tweets or videos being posted in support or against any particular issue. People tweeted for various different issues like canceling exams which were being organized for the final year students, the opening of Liquor shops, and for the fees being raised or full fee being taken in this online mode of education for current COVID period.

Talking about the latter issue, universities and schools are asking for full fees to be paid which include development fee, maintenance fee, and fee for various other College amenities which are not being used. Students are writing to the authorities, texting them, and even mailing but in return what they get is no response. People who were sustaining themself on saving got no choice except for paying the fee.

My university also sent me a doc having the details about the fee for this semester and last day of submission is August 4, 2020. We, students, were unhappy with the decision of the authorities and were thinking of emailing or tweeting about this in bulk so that we are heard and some action is taken on this but most of the students were not willing to be a part of this as they knew that authorities take months to fix a small problem going in the university and they did not want to waste their time and energy doing this. I too knew what the end result was going to be but still thought of giving it a try and the motive of this blog is to let you know about the option I took which neither took a lot of time nor required much energy to work upon.

Plan A

I created a Twitter bot to tweet about this issue tagging up all the concerned authorities with a hashtag #FessKamKaroCPU. The tweet also had an image that had a message which I want the authorities to know about. (Not adding the message due to obvious reasons)

I made a bot using python and tweepy(you can find the tutorial blog in my posts) and ran that bot on the localhost as I wanted to invest the least time and energy in this. The bot performed well and tweeted did around 270 tweets in 2 hours or so.

These results are only due to one bot tweeting about an issue for 2 hours straight. You can think of what results 10 bots can have when they are made to tweet about a particular hashtag simultaneously. Not only this, what if we programmed the bots that they retweet the tweets having the same hashtag from itself and from other users tweeting with the particular hashtag?

This can make a particular hashtag, a trending one, in just few hours and there is a chance that some of the other concerned people view your tweets and helps you resolve the issue which is not only yours.

Some people might be thinking that this was a wrong move, rather I should have a talk with the authorities visiting the university. Yes, I would have done so but as I mentioned a small problem takes months to be resolved there was no point going and having a talk when there around 100+ cases of COVID-19 being reported in my city on a daily basis.

How I got this idea?

I got this idea as I was working on some bots and automation to make my work easy.

How are fake trends possible?

BBC once reported that any artificial trend can be created with bots tweeting about the same in large numbers. There are chances that some of the bot accounts may be banned but if you program your bots in a way that they tweet about the same issue but in a different way each time, you can save them from being banned.

Plan B

I was also planning to make a mail bot that will send emails to the authorities after a certain time period, each day until the deadline, but thought of dropping this idea.

I wrote this article just to let people know that these could be the option that could be used to make your voice reach to right ears as this is 2020 and writing an application and waiting for the authorities to respond is out of trend.

I hope you have got to learn about something from this. If you have any doubts or want to know how I did this you can connect with me on Linkedin:- Harsh Kumar Khatri | LinkedIn