Doesn't that make more sense than lots of people caring about Cracker Barrel?

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.”

  • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.mlEnglish
    10·
    16 hours ago

    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

    • Zephorah@discuss.onlineEnglish
      6·
      15 hours ago

      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.

    • pelespirit@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
      3·
      16 hours ago

      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.

      • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.mlEnglish
        3·
        15 hours ago

        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”