Since we created the Bro Twitter account @Bro_IDS in 2011, the channel has turned into one of the most effective ways for reaching out to the Bro community. Every Tweet now reaches more than 5000 followers and counting.
While @Bro_IDS serves us as a microphone for our own updates, we have also always been liberal with retweeting news from the broader Bro community, hoping to help create visibility for Bro’s diverse user population around the world. However, with the tremendous audience that @Bro_IDS is now reaching, there comes responsibility, too. To ensure that the @Bro_IDS team’s decisions remain fair and transparent, the Bro Leadership Team has recently devised a set of guidelines for the account that we would like to share.
Overall, we see @Bro_IDS as serving as a distributor of news related to Bro, covering activity from both the Bro Project itself as well as from the broader community. For the project’s own messages, we may tweet about recent developments, events that the team’s involved with, or external pointers that we deem interesting. As a general rule, if a Tweet originates from @Bro_IDS, it represents the voice of the project.
We use a different policy when retweeting from the community. Generally, we are happy to retweet Bro-related news from users and organizations; just make sure to include @Bro_IDS in your Tweet so that we will see it. This does explicitly include corporate announcements—we are happy to provide visibility for, e.g., products and services, or relevant job postings, as long as they involve a substantial Bro component. However, @Bro_IDS does not endorse external organizations or content. When we retweet, we do so from a neutral perspective, and without judgement.
Our rules for deciding what to retweet are pretty straight-forward: the Tweet must be directly related to Bro; it must not substantially overlap with anything we have already passed on recently; and it must not create the impression, directly or indirectly, that the Bro Project would endorse the content. As an exception, for non-commercial activity we may occasionally also forward news that’s not directly Bro-centric if it still appears relevant to a large part of the Bro community; examples would be the newest OpenSSL vulnerability, or an interesting research paper in the space. We usually do not retweet follow-up conversations unless there’s significant additional information that warrants an update on its own.
We believe that through this policy, @Bro_IDS can serve the Bro community as a valuable, fair source of news. To receive all the updates, make sure to follow @Bro_IDS. If you want to reach the Bro community for your announcement, include @Bro_IDS in your Tweet.
The Bro Team
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