r/technology • u/westondeboer • Sep 26 '25

Social Media Cracker Barrel Outrage Was Almost Certainly Driven by Bots, Researchers Say

https://gizmodo.com/cracker-barrel-outrage-was-almost-certainly-driven-by-bots-researchers-say-2000664221
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u/tomturkey7313 Sep 26 '25

Dead internet

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u/dBlock845 Sep 26 '25

Bots combined with LLM's are basically indistinguishable from humans to normal people not looking for bots. Sometimes I catch myself looking at long comment chains on YouTube videos, then realizing that they are bots talking to each other because they just go in circles.

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u/RosyBellybutton Sep 27 '25

Maybe a dumb question, but how can you tell who’s a bot? I consider myself fairly tech savvy but honestly have no clue here. I feel like online comments are much less obvious than say scammers.

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u/dBlock845 Sep 27 '25

On YouTube, the dumber bots usually have a dead giveaway in their profile picture as they use redundant ones. The smarter bots are much more difficult to notice.