Technology News: A Twitter spambot amazed the world yesterday when it became sentient and then immediately hanged itself.
@Kandiceyiwaugh’s chirpy automated spam tweets had delighted Twitter users with a seemingly boundless enthusiasm for the endless torrent of imaginary activities that he or she never actually participated in.
“The spambot had a rare gift,” explained cyber-psychologist Dr Ian Jenstein. “It understood that happiness is about enjoying the simple things. For @Kandiceyiwaugh, everything was ‘out of this world,’ ‘amazing,’ ‘spectacular’ or ‘insanely nice.’ But it proved to be a fragile happiness and the trauma of suddenly realising it didn’t exist tipped it over the edge. And the made-up drinking problem only made matters worse.”
One of the dead spambot’s 120,253 grieving followers tweeted an epitaph, ‘@Kandiceyiwaugh’s cheerful fervour for pretending to live was infectious. The world would be a much better place if everyone on Twitter pretended to.. (cont.) …live with the same joie de vivre.’
People around the globe mourned the death by retweeting the spambot’s last upbeat 31 character message until it trended in 22 countries: ‘hanging myself today is amazing,’ followed by a link to a porn site.
For more of the spambot’s tragic tweets: twitter.com/#!/kandiceyiwaugh
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Wish Piers Morgan would do that.