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.”
Of course it was. It never made any sense to me that anyone would GAF.
The thing is people were persuaded to GAF. We hear “driven by bots” and we think “oh so it was fake.” But bots are merely the PR mechanism of choice in 2025. In prior decades it might have been AM radio and a bunch of press releases faxed around or influence networks pumping the talk shows for airtime or church networks getting people riled up from the pulpit. But the game has always been the same. It’s only the tools that have changed.
Absolutely!
Yes, but that’s like saying cutting trees is the same game when it went from handsaws to today’s harvesters. Technically they do the same thing, but the scale and efficiency is a world apart.
Oh I completely agree. My point is that just because it was driven by bots doesn’t mean it was fake and therefore we can ignore it (I believe some people have that perception when they hear that some online uproar was driven by bots).
I thought it was stupid but not stupid enough to boycott
Yes. It’s incredibly stupid. But I don’t see why anyone cares.
That said, I could absolutely believe that the rebranding was to deliberately destroy the brand, as part of some rich people destroy Toys R Us / Gamestop type of crap.
I could see that as it was such a stupid logo