https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=55246
--- Comment #4 from Kunal Mehta (Legoktm) legoktm.wikipedia@gmail.com --- I see, indeed.
Could you post the output of
import query print query.json.__file__
for your bot? I cannot reproduce the bug, so I suspect it might be due to a buggy json package. I'll do some package sniffing to check this further.