Q&A: Max Bittker's Twitter Bot Tracks New Words in The New York Times

On 11 January, U.S. President Donald Trump reportedly used a choice word during an Oval Office meeting about immigration. Just like that, a term that's usually not part of respectable public vernacular had been splashed on the front pages of newspapers and media websites. That evening, a twitter bot called New New York Times, running under the handle @NYT_first_said, tweeted the word: "shithole." The bot scans The New York Times for words that the esteemed newspaper uses for the first time. That tweet went viral and the Twitter account gained a bunch of new followers. We chatted with Max Bittker, the San Francisco-based software engineer who built the bot.