Did something feel…off about the whole Cracker Barrel debacle to you? Did you, in the midst of the endless stream of outrage directed at the Southern country-style restaurant, pause and think, “There’s just no way anyone cares about Cracker Barrel’s logo this much, right?” Well, you might have been onto something. According to data compiled by intelligence platform PeakMetrics, nearly half of the early posts about Cracker Barrel’s logo change appeared to be generated by bots.
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.”
The campaigns don’t seem as though they were limited to X, either. 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.
From August 19, when the logo change was announced, to September 5, a few days after the company not only rolled back the logo but also deleted LGBTQ and diversity and inclusion pages from its website, about 2,020,000 posts were made about the whole debacle on X. PeakMetrics estimates that nearly a quarter of those, 24% in total, were likely to be posted by bots. A little ironic, given the group outraged by the whole thing loves to call people who disagree with them NPCs.
Of course, that means 75% of those posts were from people. PeakMetrics notes that the earliest posts expressing dismay and frustration at Cracker Barrel’s decision to update its logo came from human-run accounts. Once the bot networks started to pick up on the trend, though, they blew the whole thing up. “Authentic voices articulated cultural dissatisfaction, which bots then amplified,” the report said.
PeakMetrics didn’t attribute the bot megaphone to any specific organization or state actor. Rather, it found, “The initiators are ideological activist accounts with prior culture-war posting histories, supported by botnets.” One read on that might be that the right-wing outrage farmers seem to have some inauthentic support that makes them seem more influential than they actually are.
Maybe knowing that these outrage cycles aren’t entirely authentic will be enough for corporations like Cracker Barrel to simply ignore the outrage cycle, knowing that most of the bluster won’t amount to anything. Bots don’t really eat biscuits and gravy, after all.