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.”

  • MiDaBa@lemmy.ml
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    21 hours ago

    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.