Whether Musk really means it or he’s just got buyer’s remorse, his bot-phobia is a head-scratcher for many Twitter veterans, who see bots as a big part of what makes the platform useful and fun.

The big picture: Twitter bots are programs that post to Twitter based on coded instructions (written by humans). There are:

utility bots that organizations use to autopost news and blog items;

creative bots made by software artists or fans of poets;

and spam bots that swamp discussion threads with automated responses or come-ons for get-rich-quick schemes.