Twitter bot devoted to cute baby animals sends porn, disappointing these bear cubs

The viral content landscape is dominated by bots, constantly aggregating, scraping, and assimilating content, generally stolen from other users, and then repurposing it. The end game is, as ever, numbers: an easy way to accumulate followers forever. Steal enough viral videos and eventually you can start monetizing them—just ask The Fat Jew. Twitter’s terse format is even better for automated content generation, with some estimates putting the number of bot Twitter accounts as high as 48 million, or 15 percent of all users.

Anyway, @BabyAnimalPics is a pretty premiere account, with over 2 million users tuning in to its repurposed Vines and Twitter videos of baby rabbits and dogs and birds and shit. You know, this sort of thing:

Been there! Today, under the caption “Not to alarm anyone but look at this cute doggo in his rain coat,” they posted some hardcore porn. (It’s here, but fair warning: it’s porn.) The account’s fans are responding with almost existential despair, as if their one sacred corner of the internet had been sullied. A few other Twitter users have sussed out how things went awry here:

Buffer popped in to say that @BabyAnimalPics must’ve used a third-party tool to steal the porn that was originally posted with the word “Doggo” in it. All of which makes a lot of sense, and goes some way to explaining how shit like this happens. On the other hand, in the grand sea of pornography and actual animal pics that compose the vast majority of the visible internet, perhaps the bots have just stopped differentiating, merely serving viewers whatever it is they desire at the most base possible level. Soon neural nets will be auto-generating cute animal videos for us, weird baby falcon-dogs spouting feel-good maxims about dancing like no one’s watching.

Anyway, in the meantime here are some lizards on a date: