If you think it's silly because it's not a restaurant you go to, imagine if Coca-Cola replaced their script logo with some generic sans-serif one. Don't you think the outrage would be real?

I can't imagine being upset at something like that. I'm sure there would be people upset, given the nonsense that happened in the 80s, but being personally invested in corporate branding has got to be the saddest sort of parasocial relationship possible.

> And it means that over half weren't bots.

Just a small number of fake accounts can likely stir up tensions quite a lot.

I've noticed some of the biggest outrage usually comes as reactions to screenshots of what the other side is saying. There is of course nothing preventing you from running some of those accounts as well.

Your point doesn’t exist in opposition to the research, because both can be true.

This misses that virality is driven by amplification. Further, that bots were aiming to drive a specific take/narrative/vibe. This is abuse and manipulation of our common spaces.

Deciding that this is unacceptable, understanding the mechanisms, is how we develop approaches that deal with the situation to the best of our ability.

It may be that we don’t hamper speech when its happening, but we can decide that post analysis and evidence, to hold manipulators accountable.

Or figure out some other path forward. Either way, reading the report before dismissing it out of habit and a desire to return to the olde days, doesn’t result in much of a discussion.

> And it means that over half weren't bots.

I think the important thing here is to see which came first. How many people in a crowd do you need to start clapping, to end up with everyone applauding?

If you look around the room and half the people agreeing with you are plants then something seems off.

It's not hard to start a bar fight if you don't care who wins or what it's over. The angriest people are easily manipulated to point their anger in whatever direction the manipulator wants.

As someone who has been to Cracker Barrel many times I find it hard to believe there was such strong affection for the logo. The logo is the least distinctive or memorable thing about Cracker Barrel's restaurant design.

> This is a useless statistic without a comparison of what percentage of activity is bots for any culture-war news story of the day.

Why is that?

The large proportion of early bot posts suggests the outrage was largely manufactured, which is pretty interesting to me.

Now, if culture war news stories are typically artificially manufactured, that would be even more interesting. So I agree that context would be good. But this info still stands on its own.

(And, of course there are sincere objections to this logo/branding change. But that doesn't appear to explain why this blew up.)

>This is a useless statistic without a comparison of what percentage of activity is bots for any culture-war news story of the day.

There's a grain of truth in here, but you're taking it way too far. I'd rather have that number you're asking for than not have it to be sure, but the percentage still matters in absolute terms.

If you are literally angry your favorite corporately owned chain restaurant changed their logo and/or their decor, you got bigger problems.

It's actually not that useless. Everything organic, or interacting with something natural follows the power law. Or 80/20 if you prefer.

When working on security and integrity issues, we found 10-20% of all traffic would be inorganic. The more course the metric, the more likely it was to be exactly 20%

To me, knowing nothing about this specfic domain, and just abuse/integrity in general, 45% means it's well over double what I'd expect from an unmanaged source. Well over double, because true double wouldn't be 40% (20/100) + 20 = 40/120 = 33%

This heuristic tells me it's specific, targeted, and well above the background noise youms might ignore for higher priorities. In other words, it's a problem that's actionable.

Here, I assume stoking anger and outrage is the goal. That's why it not being 20% is significant.

I initially didn't understand it at all, the "it's because DEI" complaints made no sense to me. So they took a dude off the logo, and suddenly it's diversity run amok? It felt like too much of a stretch.

And then after being exposed to the controversy for a bit, I saw an article quoting the _female_ CEO, and suddenly the line of thinking made sense.

I wonder if the botnets are primarily driven by legit grassroots-ish political actors, moneyed interests, or something else. Could be generic foreign influence/destabilization groups. Could also be effectively be a convenient bot/LLM training ground.

> Don't you think the outrage would be real?

It would be real but only because people’s priorities tend to be incredibly silly. Like, giving children free school lunch is an original sin to probably a lot of the subset that gave a care about the Cracker Barrel logo… and for some reason there was a whole internet movement to remake a movie because a group didn’t like what was released (Justice League).

> imagine if Coca-Cola replaced their script logo with some generic sans-serif one. Don't you think the outrage would be real?

The Coca Cola comparison is apt, but it’s beyond the logo. In the 80s formulation of the product changed to taste more like the competitor, it came with a logo change as well. Basically they took an iconic brand with a distinctive iconic flavor and made it a bland and generic cola. It was a disaster.

Cracker Barrel literally did the same thing. They set off changed the things that made them distinct from every other generic bland southern food restaurant. Their food isn’t distinctive, but their ambience and lore is. I wonder if someone would have brought up New Coke when they were having the product and marketing meets around the design change. I suspect CEO excitement around the idea probably caused folks to sit silent.

> If you think it's silly because it's not a restaurant you go to

One can also think it's silly because... It's silly. The assumption that everyone who doesn't care must not be a customer is incorrect.

> imagine if Coca-Cola replaced their script logo with some generic sans-serif one.

I'm imagining it and find myself indifferent. Why would I have an emotional connection to the Coke logo?

I don't particularly care about Cracker Barrel (the logo wasn't great to begin with) but I do dislike the steady loss of decoration in mainstream design. It's not just generic, it's also uglier. I blame the French Union of Modern Artists & the rest of the Modernist movement in the late 1930s for starting the decline.

I'll allow being upset that something you love is changing because you're nostalgic for what it's always been, struggle with change and don't like how bland modern design is. I don't personally get it (though I've got solidarity regarding the blandness of design), but I understand those sentiments exist in others and am OK with that.

What I don't get, and what was truly excessive, is blaming it on "woke" and watching our politicians and president get involved. That was all beyond stupid.

> If you think it's silly because it's not a restaurant you go to

It would be fine if Cracker Barrel was just an isolated example - I would guess then it would be just a curiosity, not an "outrage". But it's not isolated - it's a broad aesthetic trend in everything from architecture [0] to art to graphic design [1].

It's that trend people object to. Cracker Barrel is just the latest slice of the salami.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/architecture/comments/199sjmn/thoug...

[1] https://medium.com/@zuktechnologies/why-modern-logos-all-loo...

^ Found the bot!

(Just teasin')

But in seriousness, yes people may have been feeling genuinely nostalgic, the point is that bots were used to play up peoples' nostalgia, to turn it into fear, moral outrage and finally "victory against a woke enemy", a deep sense of oxytocin and loyalty.

It's also very likely that bots attach to spreading memes to gain visibility however that helps, IDK but then again banner ads were a thing.

I've never been to a Cracker Barrel so it has no personal meaning to me, but I was bothered by the logo change anyway. Bothered, not enraged.

It bothered me because it was yet another instance of our built world becoming increasingly sterile and lifeless, like a rejection of humanity itself.

There is no way people are that passionate about graphic design. All the debate about the logo has to do with conservatives declaring Cracker Barrel was going woke and getting angry about it and turning it into yet another front for their culture war.

Cracker Barrel is a mediocre chain people associate with the term “American.” That being said, this isn’t changing the Statue of Liberty. It’s a corporate logo change. People took this personally because virtually everything is part of the culture war now.

> Most people care about whether they can afford fun things, who they're sleeping with, and what they're having for dinner.

Ahhh, I see most of us are swimming around the bottom of Maslow's heirarchy of needs.

That is a fascinating article and definitely something to bear in mind.

To some extent we all have fragile egos. Speaking personally, if I upset someone then I will be devastated for days, even if it was just a misunderstanding rather than me deliberately trying to hurt. Yet in social media world, it is a world of pain, with people getting brutal comments every day, for them still to post the next day and the day after that.

To some extent, negative attention is still attention, and, presumably for some, if you can't get positive attention, any attention will do. Cue 'rage-baiting', where the goal is to incite lots of negative comments.

Anyway, I am of the opinion that in the last century 'the camera never lied' but in today's world, the camera is always lying. On social media everything needs to be considered a lie first until proven otherwise. Add to that, the posters are likely to have psychiatric disorders, and I think I am now outta there!

You can buy server racks for under $200 from China that are made for holding like 20 Android motherboards. Get 50 of those and some centralised management software to interact with all of them on one big screen and you have potentially 1000 unique users that will be really hard to distinguish from bots using normal techniques. That's more than enough to jump-start a viral moment on many social media platforms. And if you hire 5 guys to post full time, you can completely steer the discussion on individual channels like facebook groups, instagram posts or reddit/HN threads.

I'm not a bot! You're the bot!

:)

It was mostly children. Every child is on the internet and uses the same social medias adults use.

People don't care about single specific change. But they notice and are annoyed when it becomes a trend and half of the market is turning to generic boring sameness. So they latch on to the current culprit.

I think people in general value identity of the brands more than many brands themselves do. And the change is in some ways attack to them, not to the brand.

Bring people together IRL.

I think one possible technical solution would be inherent bandwidth, range and commercial exploitation limitations. E.g. I think in a LoRa mesh network, you find those naturally. RNodes and Reticulum come to mind: https://unsigned.io/

Basically, through these hardware/physics restrictions abuse and enshittification doesn't scale, but genuine information does, and social communication patterns and scope resembles human nature/biological legacy better than the global web. Artificial software limitations can be cheated always, like with GPS spoofing, VPNs and so on. I presume, you could build communities around people, whose fates are actually connected significantly. A "killer app" to start off, could be dating, or blackboards, get the cool kidz aboard by using it to exclusively advertise the next rave, etc.. It is hard to censor and will be used for illegal activities, too, but it won't enable anything that's not happening on messengers anyway.

Don't discount state actors.

You can absolutely derail a democracy you are not fond of by stoking the flames on both extremes on the political spectrum.

In my vague recollection, there was some legitimate outrage. The logo was just what people rallied behind, people were really upset that they planned to remodel the whole restaurant/store with some generic corporate slop. The “woke” comments came after from the usual crowd.

If you have ever been in a Cracker Barrel, it has a very distinct feel of soulful agrarian Americana. I suspect most people used the fight as a proxy for preserving that part of our culture, which is getting more rare/unknown in modern America.

I definitely saw some. It came from people who were in that culture war space where they interpret every trend as being part of a big left-wing plot to impose their values on everybody else.

I really try to avoid anything about politics here, but I recall there already being a controversy about this back in May of 2024. Specifically, there were public comments from the new CEO to investors about Cracker Barrel needing to change the demographics of the customers who ate at Cracker Barrel, and, depending on your point of view, some people interpreted the way the comments were said as suggesting that there was something morally suspect about how non-diverse, non-inclusive, old-and-white-and-straight the current dining demographics at Cracker Barrel were. There was a small right-of-center online public outrage du jour about it at the time. I'm not interested in litigating what the CEO said or how justified the outrage was, just noting precedent.

I can't find any of that discussion online, because it has been totally overshadowed by the more recent logo drama, but you can see a bloodless summary of the event here from the time: https://www.nrn.com/family-dining/cracker-barrel-unveils-str...

So there already was a pre-existing history here for people who are sympathetic to this point of view, particularly coming as it did shortly after some similar Bud Light and Target controversies.

100 %.I absolutely did not get the political view. Some people made the female CEO out to be the devil.

The logo is very corporate, some might say soulless now, but I get it; it's a first step to modernize the brand.

> because apparently, one of the demands of leftist extremists is conforming to sans-serif supremacy.

I think we can unanimously agree that serif fonts are an existential threat to civilization.

I really hope it was bots that drove the outrage. If it wasn’t, I don’t know what to say.

It’s a logo.

Seems like a plausible strategy to try to associate existing outrage with the cause the bot operator is trying to advance.

Interesting. I do remember encountering these types of shitstorms and being confused why on earth it's being turned into a debate about capitalism or immigrants or whatever.

I think some people are convinced that everything they don't like about society (in this case, companies coming up with "sterile" logos) is Woke and generally part of The Culture War.

As they say, the internet makes you stupid.

I would assume the association with “woke” comes from prior instances of Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, the butter lady all being sanitized such that any such sanitation is now associated with “woke politics.”

It’s now a trained knee-jerk response.

Any event, no matter how insignificant, is cause enough for the right to manufacture outrage against that ever ill-defined "wokeness" and point the finger at "the radical left".

The logo has an old, southern white man, which some would call a "cracker" as a sort of white slur. That term originally comes from someone being a "whip-cracker." I'll let you fill in the blanks.

The people who complain about bots never seem to identify bots posting things that they agree with.

"the bots" is the new false consciousness, it is a deliberate attempt to avoid engaging

Why don't you think it's good evidence? Did you even read the report?

I think the implication is that the bots bootstrapped the drama which created real offense from real people. That's why the bots are effective, because the audience is predictably easy to rile up once one of two sides is labeled as "woke".

"A lot of people" meaning bots.

No real-life person thought the logo was offensive before or that the logo became woke. It never passed the smell test.

well gizmodo is a left wing outlet so no surprise here. when the left can't win an argument based on logic or even emotion, next tactic up is often ad hominem