A TWITTER bot which was developed to randomly mash together the flags of different countries has found itself at the centre of a half-humorous, half-enraged storm from Irish Twitter users.
The bot, named Flags Mashup Bot, randomly generates hybrid flags. That's it-- that's all it does. Like below.
Mixed 🇵🇰 (Pakistan) + 🇩🇲 (Dominica), and created this new country called Domistan: pic.twitter.com/m3etDfaYUV
— Flags Mashup Bot (@FlagsMashupBot) August 29, 2019
The bot has no opinions, no voice, no politics. You'd think it would be safe.
Except that it created a flag called 'United Ireland'. And it wasn't what people wanted to see.
Mixed 🇬🇧 (United Kingdom) + 🇮🇪 (Ireland), and created this new country called United Ireland: pic.twitter.com/6XwnIf3DOE
— Flags Mashup Bot (@FlagsMashupBot) August 27, 2019
Most of the bot's flags get a handful of likes and maybe a couple of replies. But this was no ordinary flag.
Currently standing at over 5,000 likes, the thousands of replies mostly consisted of gifs of people screaming, Simpsons memes and just general insanity.
Like this viscerally hurts me soul pic.twitter.com/Es6FabMPoS
— Iarnród Éireann Brockovich 🏳️⚧️ (@yascaoimhin) August 27, 2019
— Fritz the cat ☣ (@britto_shane) August 27, 2019
Memes of The Big Fellow Michael Collins also made an appearance.
@admiralbonnso replied with this... powerful imageThe real, actual human owner of the mashup bot ended up having to get involved.
They advised people to "Guys don't take this seriously... I've never seen so madness in the replies.
Remember this is randomly created by the python script running the bot."
Guys dont take this seriously... I've never seen so madness in the replies
Remember this is randomly created by the python script running the bot— Flags Mashup Bot (@FlagsMashupBot) August 28, 2019
But of course... that just led to more madness.
Oh god I looked at it again. pic.twitter.com/HkuOtzTsvD
— Bainser (@bainser) August 28, 2019
This is a niche area of Irish humour-- humour built on rage but humour nonetheless.
This man put it nicely:
Thanks for writing my obituary
— Craig (@glasghost) August 28, 2019
'Flag-gate' led to the owner pinning a tweet at the top of their page promising that robot was not political in any way and begging people to just have a good time.
Do not relate any mashup to politics or hate speech or something similar.
I did this bot to generate random flags not to create a war about nationalism and politics in the replies
Lets just have a good time— Flags Mashup Bot (@FlagsMashupBot) August 28, 2019
Who knew a flag bot could rile such controversy.
