PeakMetrics grabbed a sample of 52,000 posts made on X within the first 24 hours of Cracker Barrel’s announcement that it would be modernizing its logo to an admittedly very plain and generic design. In that timeframe, it found that 44.5% of all mentions of Cracker Barrel were flagged as likely or higher bot activity. Those numbers climb even higher when a boycott is mentioned. About 1,000 posts in that first 24-hour period called on people to stop eating at Cracker Barrel, and 49% of those posts got flagged as likely coming from bots. In its report, PeakMetrics states that the boycott was unlikely to be an organic grassroots response but a “bot-assisted amplification seeded by meme/activist accounts.”
People are easily convinced to choose a view based on what everyone else around them is doing. This is why Ai is such a threat right now because a single actor can flood social media, comment boards and other online groups with comments arguing a point to convince everyone theyre the ones with the alternative view. It’s programmed social manipulation.
IWW4@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
Of course it was. It never made any sense to me that anyone would GAF.
scarabic@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
The thing is people were persuaded to GAF. We hear “driven by bots” and we think “oh so it was fake.” But bots are merely the PR mechanism of choice in 2025. In prior decades it might have been AM radio and a bunch of press releases faxed around or influence networks pumping the talk shows for airtime. But the game has always been the same. It’s only the tools that have changed.
IWW4@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
Absolutely!
RightEdofer@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Yes, but that’s like saying cutting trees is the same game when it went from handsaws to today’s harvesters. Technically they do the same thing, but the scale and efficiency is a world apart.
SendMePhotos@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I thought it was stupid but not stupid enough to boycott
pinball_wizard@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
Yes. It’s incredibly stupid. But I don’t see why anyone cares.
That said, I could absolutely believe that the rebranding was to deliberately destroy the brand, as part of some rich people destroy Toys R Us / Gamestop type of crap.