> In that timeframe, it found that 44.5% of all mentions of Cracker Barrel were flagged as likely or higher bot activity.

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

And it means that over half weren't bots.

People really were genuinely bothered by replacing an old-timey logo they grew up with and loved, with some bland corporate logo that looks like everything else.

Also they were pissed off about the similar redesign of the interiors from homey personality to generic bland gray.

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?

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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).

they were pissed off about the similar redesign of the interiors from homey personality to generic bland gray.

Some people just like to be mad about things.

Pennies, Daylight Savings Time, bike lanes, all kinds of inconsequential things get anger-seekers angry.

> 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'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.

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.

> 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.