Twitter suspends bot that corrected use of 'illegal immigrant'

American journalists Patrick Hogan and Jorge Rivas came up with the Twitter initiative @DroptheIBot, which detected tweets using the term "illegal immigrant" and responded to them directly.

Twitter users who included the phrase in any context received a message from the bot offering suggestions such as "undocumented immigrant" or "unauthorised immigrant" instead.

The Twitter bot ran once every ten minutes, and did not revert to the same user twice in order to avoid spamming people.

The campaign was in existence for several days and had tweeted more than 400 responses.