2020
Robotox
Category: Innovation (small and large newsrooms)
Country/area: Brazil
Organisation: Agência Pública, Repórter Brasil
Organisation size: Small
Publication date: 14/05/2019
Credit: Natalia Viana, Babak Fakhamzadeh, Pedro Grigori, Bruno Fonseca
Project description:
Robotox is a Twitter bot that tweets whenever new pesticides have been authorised by the Brazilian government, for use in the agriculture sector.Robotox is a Twitter bot that tweets whenever new pesticides have been authorised by the Brazilian government, for use in the agriculture sector.
Impact reached:
Significant. Because information on the authorisation of new pesticides is buried deep in daily state journals, this information was hard to access. By making this information easily and publicly available, Robotox has provided much transparency on what pesticides have been given state authorisation.
The Twitter account has around 17.500 followers. The lauch of Robotox was reported by some media outlets, such as Outras Palavras, Hypeness and Open Knowledge Brasil. Also, it was mentioned in some articles, one of them written by Eliane Brum, one of the most important environmental journalists in Brazil.
A radio show broadcasted on the radio of the Federal University of Minas Gerais mentioned Robotox in an episode about how science is looking for alternatives to reduce the use of pesticides.
Techniques/technologies used:
Robotox reads the daily state journal and looks for texts indicating the authorisation of new pesticides. When new pesticides have been authorised, all new pesticides are extracted, ordered and queued up for being sent out as tweets.
The underlying database is a MySQL database, the scripting is server-based and done in PHP. Tweets are sent out via the Twitter API.
What was the hardest part of this project?
The most difficult part of developing Robotox was to interpret the texts of the daily state journals to abstract information on the authorisation of new pesticides. This requires a type of natural language processing, which is technically difficult.
What can others learn from this project?
The Brazilian state appears to authorise the use of a painfully large amount of poisons to manipulate our food production.
