Trumpster Fire Twitter Bot

January 01, 2018

A photograph of a large dumpster with flames coming out of it. The flames have been edited to appear as the face of President Donald Trump

I wrote a simple Twitter bot to represent anything tweeted by the President in a somewhat different format. Running on a simple Virtual Machine, the bot checks Trump’s Twitter feed every 10 minutes for new posts. Whenever it detects a new tweet, it pulls the text and overlays it atop an animated GIF of a dumpster fire using a python script and the Python Image Library (PIL). I have used this twitter bot (along with its inspiration, @RealPressSecBot) as examples to teach Marshall McLuhan’s famous assertion that “the medium is the message.” By taking the same content – one of Trump’s tweets – and adapting it to different formats, the overall message being communicated can change significantly.