Botshevic, the Revolutionary Poet

A twitter poet-bot against the suppression and censorship of artistic freedom in the EU. Botshevic is a generative poet inspired by revolution, resistance and disobedience.

May 2021

Materials: Code, data, generative systems, NLP

Currently, in the EU, several countries are applying legislation that suppresses and censors artistic freedom. Under the pretext that any material "should not contain incitement to violence or hatred and public incitement to a terrorist crime", freedom of speech is abolished. Many artists were censored, detained and imprisoned in several countries across the EU. The most important condition for democracy is the exercise of freedom of speech. Therefore, any law that prevents it consequently cancels the concept of democracy. Botshevic is an experiment against this suppression and censorship online. It is an aspiring generative bot-poet, fed with historic poems that inspired generations to resist, protest and dream about freedom, equal rights and justice. Every few minutes a poem is generated on the spot as a tweet and is sent to the vast oblivion called the internet, simply to try to annoy those who want to subdue and suppress.