{"id":85676,"date":"2025-10-16T06:00:03","date_gmt":"2025-10-16T10:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/geneveith\/?p=85676"},"modified":"2025-10-06T17:03:45","modified_gmt":"2025-10-06T21:03:45","slug":"ai-bots-grassroot-campaigns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/geneveith\/2025\/10\/ai-bots-grassroot-campaigns\/","title":{"rendered":"AI Bots & “Grassroot” Campaigns"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

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When Cracker Barrel restaurants started changing their old-timey decor and their folksy logo, it created an online tsunami of outrage and calls for a boycott.\u00a0 The social media frenzy was so great that the company ended up backtracking, putting the churns and washboards back on the walls and placing the old man and the cracker barrel back on the sign.<\/p>\n

It turns out, though, that the biggest defender of nostalgia and traditional small town rural values against Cracker Barrel\u2019s corporate rebranding plan was Artificial Intelligence!\u00a0 We now know that nearly half of the outrage posts on social media were AI-generated!<\/p>\n

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So reports Patrick Coffee in his Wall Street Journal<\/em> article Bot Networks Are Helping Drag Consumer Brands Into the Culture Wars<\/a> with the deck, \u201cAI tools have made coordinated attacks targeting corporations much more common, researchers say.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course, human beings initiated the reaction.\u00a0 But, apparently, other players\u2013not necessarily those who felt strongly about the issue\u2013programmed AI bots to pile on as a way of getting money for hits, page views, and shared posts.\u00a0 Coffee reports on the findings of the tracking service PeakMetrics:<\/p>\n

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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.<\/p>\n

Hundreds of bots soon began sharing the posts, replying to them and posting their own, PeakMetrics said.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Other signs included repeating the same thing dozens of times or posting consistently almost 24 hours a day, Dwyer said.<\/p>\n

Bots or likely bots\u00a0authored 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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The Cracker Barrel case is only one example of AI\u2019s role in \u201cgrassroots\u201d social media campaigns.\u00a0 Amazon, McDonald\u2019s, and other companies have been targeted with calls for boycotts for abandoning their DEI initiatives.\u00a0 Again, it turns out much of the online traffic on those issues have come from AI bots.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe rise of generative artificial-intelligence tools has made botnet campaigns both easier to manage and harder to detect,\u201d says Coffee, who quotes computer science professor Emilio Ferrara: \u201cWhat\u2019s different now is how quickly AI-powered bots can spin up \u2018grassroots-looking\u2019 campaigns around incendiary or divisive issues, e.g., culture-war topics, and keep them trending.\u201d\u00a0 This is happening both for causes on the left and on the right.<\/p>\n

\u201cSocial media mobs\u201d have shaken businesses, politicians, and entertainers, prompting firings, cancellations, and character assassinations.\u00a0 It\u2019s worth remembering that in an AI world, the members of these mobs might not even exist.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n<\/p>

Illustration:\u00a0 From An Outside Chance<\/a>, CC0 1.0<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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