WeBot Uses Facebook to Help You Find Your Nearest Protest

CBS

It's an odd cocktail of sad and inspiring to see just how much protesting is going on across the world at the moment. Social media has made it far easier to promote and organise such gatherings, but at the current rate, it's easy to become confused, and overwhelmed, only to find that a demonstration you would have been interested in has passed you by.

WeBot is a Facebook Messenger chatbot which is designed to remedy this. Once you start talking to it, it will ask for your location, and once you provide it, it will sift through all the demonstrations happening in your local area and let you view and join the event pages. At the moment, it's geared towards anti-Trump protests, but then aren't we all.

After that, you'll be alerted whenever new nearby protests appear, and WeBot will even feed you ongoing information about the protests as they're organised. WeBot was developed in the wake of Trump's Muslim ban by brothers Logan and Nathan Bernard, in conjunction with a growth accelerator called Flatiron Collective. Previously, the brother Bernard had developed Twitter bots, but for obvious reasons, Facebook was the ideal territory for WeBot.

It's not just about making sure protests get enough attendees, it's about getting people interested in activism. If information about all this is being taken to people directly, they're much more likely to engage with it, and if they know that their friends are doing the same, well that speaks for itself.