- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
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.”
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What? You think flat earthers are real? It’s a great topic to use to see how far down the believability about other people will go.
So, bots automatically detect the sensitivity for emotional response in humans, then they repeat and amplify this response toward sensitive issues until it becomes a movement, a roiling positive feedback loop or anger
It’s pretty basic when you dig into the social psychology.
A classic outside the internet experiment would be a waiting room that starts to fill with smoke. Smoke starts to leak in at the ceiling. People see it. The variable is when the confederate (word for person who is an experimenter hire) gets up and leaves. Seeing someone leave, not the smoke itself, even as it builds up in the room, is a far better predictor of human behavior in that moment. People will take this farther than you’d think, waiting and then waiting some more, until a social cue occurs.
Online is different, yes, but our social wiring doesn’t just go away. And now, the numbers of social cues are far, far easier to manipulate. I don’t know if they’re cheaper, but the numbers side of it is disturbing.
I’ve noticed that they’re adjusting this way of doing things. It’s not just anger anymore, they’re using boredom. They’ll go into long diatribes that have a hint of a point, but they’re so long that people give up. This gets people to either be bored and leave or get distracted into a mental vacation. It also can bury the things they want buried.
Makes sense, couple first times they use the weapon, they are clumsy, hamfisted about it and they leave obvious clues of inauthenticity. But each time they learn how to blend in and become more and more subtle until it becomes impossible to prove that is not authentic, that something isn’t “happenning”.
And when the nuance is so blurred anyone trying to point to it, gets diagnosticated
“paranoid delirium disorder type persecution”
And given anti-psychotic pills until they agree, it was just a delusion,
“nothing ever happens actually doctor”
At this point. I wouldn’t be surprised if we found our Cracker Barrel was outrage farming, paid the botner to manufacture it for them so they could change it back and reap the boost from conservatives.
The point where I realized it was fake was when nobody was complaining about the font or going “Uhm, aktually it’s ‘typeface’!”
lol, people really do care about the fonts.
God, that was such a weird controversy. I don’t like oversimplified Silicon Valley culture-esque logos, but this was blown out of proportion (and surprisingly partisan, for some reason?)
When you strip away real people caring, this is what it looks like when you’re left with just the bots. They chose bi-partisan for this, because they always choose bi-partisan. Someone screaming alone isn’t worth much.
Of course it was. It never made any sense to me that anyone would GAF.
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 or church networks getting people riled up from the pulpit. But the game has always been the same. It’s only the tools that have changed.
Absolutely!
I thought it was stupid but not stupid enough to boycott
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.
Sounds about right, not even (most) rightwingers are stupid enough to care about that shit.
My uncle blew a lid at dinner over Cracker Barrel. They believe whatever their media tells them.
My solace is I know what gift card to get him for Christmas.
Modern internet for you.
It may be far from perfect, but it’s why I have such a soft spot for alternative to modern social media. If I’m going to put my through a slog of keeping these sorts of official social media accounts ip and running, I might as well make it a nicer experience.
