The Cracker Barrel "outrage" was bot-infested from the outset, according to research into the bizarre story's genesis. About half the early postings and a quarter of the total were inauthentic: "the initiators are ideological activist accounts with prior culture-war posting histories, supported by botnets."
To recap: fading roadside restaurant chain Cracker Barrel blandified its old-timey logo and right wingers launched a boycott which led, ultimately, to Cracker Barrel being pressured by the President of the United States into retaining its old logo. If all the shrieking about "woke" logos seemed off, writes A. J. Dellinger, that's because it was.
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. I… 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." … According to data collected by Open Measures, similar conversations were happening on the alt-tech platforms like Donald Trump's Truth Social, Twitter knock-offs Gettr and Gab, 4chan, and Rumble. Over those platforms, posters regularly tied the Cracker Barrel logo change to terms like "woke" and "DEI," because apparently, one of the demands of leftist extremists is conforming to sans-serif supremacy.
By the mid-late 2010s, it was commonplace for mainstream media to concoct stories around anonymous Tweets with no followers. What you'd do is think up a story that might do well—say, "outrage at child's toy"— then use Twitter search to find tweets from accounts outraged at the toy. Those tweets, however sparse, low-traffic or obviously inauthentic, would suffice as sourcing for the story. Having posted your story at BBC Newsbeat or wherever, Piers Morgan would see it, become outraged at the child's toy, and then you can edit celebrity tweets back into the story, upgrading and obscuring its sourcing.
That's basically what happened with Cracker Barrel (and many other culture war things), but it's now an optimized process that self-starts within the social media environment. A respectable news embed is no longer needed to proof a context shift from the margins of social media to human anger. A related problem is a lot of media folks are still on Twitter all day; they think they are immune to the inauthentic and algorithmic content there. Why it now frames their political outlook and forms the content of their reportage is left as an exercise for the reader.
