The word retard appears on Twitter every 5 seconds. And it's used all over social media, film and television. Yet the word is offensive, not just to people with disability, but to … read moretheir friends, families and carers. To raise awareness about the effect the word has, Marketforce created a Twitter bot to detect any English language use of the word 'Retard' or 'Retarded'. Then the bot automatically replies with a single Tweet - a video message from someone affected by the R word, talking directly to the person who just used it. In addition to programming the bot to recognise specific words from English language accounts, we also had to create an algorithm within the bot to contend with Twitter's daily tweet limits, ensuring that it complied with the platform's user requirements.
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