Cracker Barrel Outrage Was Almost Certainly Driven by Bots, Researchers Say

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

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

As they say, the internet makes you stupid.

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

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.

It’s now a trained knee-jerk response.

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 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.

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

:)

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.

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.

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 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?

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.

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.

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...

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 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.

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.)

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?

Some people just like to be mad about things.

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

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.

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

(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 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.

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.

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).

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 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.

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

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!