So reports Patrick Coffee in his Wall Street Journal article Bot Networks Are Helping Drag Consumer Brands Into the Culture Wars with the deck, “AI tools have made coordinated attacks targeting corporations much more common, researchers say.”
Of course, human beings initiated the reaction. But, apparently, other players–not necessarily those who felt strongly about the issue–programmed AI bots to pile on as a way of getting money for hits, page views, and shared posts. Coffee reports on the findings of the tracking service PeakMetrics:
The online logo backlash began with human-run accounts that have hundreds of thousands of followers. They started encouraging a boycott Aug. 20, one day after Cracker Barrel first mentioned its new logo in a press release, often accusing Cracker Barrel of fleeing its country charm and past.
Hundreds of bots soon began sharing the posts, replying to them and posting their own, PeakMetrics said.
The height of activity came just before midnight on Aug. 20, when X saw around 400 Cracker Barrel posts a minute. Seventy percent of the accounts promoting boycotts at that point used duplicate messages, a key marker of coordinated bots, said Molly Dwyer, director of insights at PeakMetrics.
Other signs included repeating the same thing dozens of times or posting consistently almost 24 hours a day, Dwyer said.
Bots or likely bots authored 44.5% of X posts mentioning Cracker Barrel in the 24 hours after the new logo gained attention on Aug. 20, according to research for The Wall Street Journal by PeakMetrics. That number rose to 49% among posts calling for a boycott.
The Cracker Barrel case is only one example of AI’s role in “grassroots” social media campaigns. Amazon, McDonald’s, and other companies have been targeted with calls for boycotts for abandoning their DEI initiatives. Again, it turns out much of the online traffic on those issues have come from AI bots.
“The rise of generative artificial-intelligence tools has made botnet campaigns both easier to manage and harder to detect,” says Coffee, who quotes computer science professor Emilio Ferrara: “What’s different now is how quickly AI-powered bots can spin up ‘grassroots-looking’ campaigns around incendiary or divisive issues, e.g., culture-war topics, and keep them trending.” This is happening both for causes on the left and on the right.
“Social media mobs” have shaken businesses, politicians, and entertainers, prompting firings, cancellations, and character assassinations. It’s worth remembering that in an AI world, the members of these mobs might not even exist.
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