This is @tauntbot, a Twitter bot that will mercilessly insult you

In case being insulted by anonymous people on Twitter wasn’t enough, there’s now a bot that will insult you too.

@tauntbot, or “You’re ridiculous” was flung into the world last week by MetaFilter user ephemerae. It proved it was very good at its job right immediately:

The point, as ephemerae describes it, is pretty straightforward (emphasis his):

TauntBot is an exercise in generated language. It uses a rather huge and growing corpus of hand-selected words, and an interesting set of rules, for hand-crafting them into verbose insults. It then posts these to Twitter. It replies to people, I’m hoping to get it to trade barbs with them. Yes, I’m a terrible person.

I love this bot. It’s like a digital Cyrano de Bergerac that’s had all the love drained from its lil’ code-based heart.

Last week a number of its tweets were aimed at financier-turned-comic-villain Martin Shkreli as well as Donald Trump:

But it’s an equal opportunity insulter, and if you engage with it, it will hit back. You don’t even have to insult it, just talk to it:

Please go talk to tauntbot so I can watch tauntbot make fun of more people. Thanks.

Ethan Chiel is a reporter for Fusion, writing mostly about the internet and technology. You can (and should) email him at [email protected]