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Comment by Simulacra | Hacker News Reader

I don't think this is good evidence for this, there was a lot of people vociferously and quite publicly concerned about Cracker Barrel. This bot excuse seems more like a ploy to downplay things.

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The people who complain about bots never seem to identify bots posting things that they agree with.

"the bots" is the new false consciousness, it is a deliberate attempt to avoid engaging

Or its easier to talk about pro party X bots, in a space that is pro party Y? and harder to talk about pro party Y bots in a space that is pro party Y.

I believe that black lives matter, but also thought it made a lot of sense that the movement and branding of it could have been bot-driven to engineer a culture war.

I think the implication is that the bots bootstrapped the drama which created real offense from real people. That's why the bots are effective, because the audience is predictably easy to rile up once one of two sides is labeled as "woke".

"A lot of people" meaning bots.

No real-life person thought the logo was offensive before or that the logo became woke. It never passed the smell test.

>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.”

Why don't you think it's good evidence? Did you even read the report?

Hi, accusing someone and asking if they even read the report is actually against the rules. Go ahead check it out.

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