Data on the controversy AD of Sydney Sweeney shows how Maga arms weapons social trends

There are a lot of online discussions on echo rooms and how certain ideas can be amplified when stuck in a silo of people sharing the same ideas. But the controversy earlier this year during the American Eagle “Good Jeans” advertising campaign featuring Sydney Sweeney is an example of the way in which motivated political actors can tear the discourse differently from social media parts and transform it into a complete drama to serve their own means.

According to data collected by the open measures of the open source social intelligence platform, revealed against the American Eagle advertising campaign, which has been criticized as a buffer in eugenics and a wink among white supremacists, was a relatively small part of the conversation surrounding the marketing effort. From July 16 to August 12, 2025, only 6% of the positions mentioning the announcement included the mention of its perceived racist nuances. But if you had the wind of discourse on this subject, you might think it was the only thing we were talking about.

Through open measures, it is because online right accounts have spotted part of the reaction and transformed it into history. On July 27, the researchers found that conservative personalities began to stimulate the selected positions to suggest that the Liberals were indignant by the advertisements. The accounts used this to generate backlash against what they painted like the whole left crying “racism” about jeans advertising. But, as the New York Times reported in August, most of the positions that were presented as representative of a broader political ideology had less than 500 views before being amplified. Meanwhile, amplification efforts were made by accounts like Libsofiktok, which has 4.5 million followers on Twitter.

The possibility of taking these small accounts by offering criticism and transforming them into a stand-in for the “awakened left” allowed the right online to generate a complete information cycle on advertising and the supposed counterposter against him, by entering the consumer information coverage, including several segments on Fox News. The biggest conversation period on the announcement, according to open measures, was not the day following its launch, but rather two weeks later, between July 30 and August 5, when the conservative amplification was at its highest level – and culminating in President Donald Trump commenting on the whole situation and saying that he “loved” the announcement.

Open measures note more: “A larger share of posts discussed advertisements which also claimed that the announcements echo the sectarian ideologies were represented on alt platforms with predominantly conservative communities than those which have not, indicating that the affirmations were more popular with prudent criticisms of the liberals than by the liberals themselves.”

There were undoubtedly people who made real and authentic criticisms of the American Eagle campaign, but the idea that these voices were somehow exemplary from the entire left simply does not correspond to the data. The law managed to take a handful of aberrant values, to transform them into representatives of something larger, then to run a whole effort to repel this story which he amplified in the first place.