There’s plenty of talk online about echo chambers and the way that certain ideas can get amplified when stuck in a silo of like-minded people. But the controversy earlier this year over American Eagle’s “Good Jeans” advertising campaign featuring Sydney Sweeney is an example of how motivated political actors can pluck otherwise insulated discourse out of parts of social media and spin it into full-blown drama to serve their own means.
According to data collected by open-source social intelligence platform Open Measures, pushback against the American Eagle ad campaign, which was criticized as dabbling in eugenics and winking at white supremacists, was a relatively small part of the conversation surrounding the marketing effort. From July 16 to August 12, 2025, just 6% of posts mentioning the ad included mention of its perceived racist undertones. But if you caught wind of the discourse about it, you’d think it was the only thing anyone was talking about.
That, per Open Measures, is because right-wing accounts online spotted some of the backlash and turned it into the story. By July 27, the researchers found that conservative personalities started to boost selected posts to suggest that liberals were outraged by the ads. The accounts used this to generate backlash against what they painted as the entire Left crying “racism” about a jeans advertisement. But, as the New York Times reported in August, most of the posts that got presented as representative of a larger political ideology had fewer than 500 views before being amplified. Meanwhile, the amplification efforts were being done by accounts like LibsOfTikTok, which has 4.5 million followers on Twitter.
The ability to take these smaller accounts offering criticism and turn them into the stand-ins for the “woke left” allowed the Online Right to generate an entire news cycle about the advertisement and the supposed backlash against it, grabbing mainstream news coverage, including multiple segments on Fox News. The biggest period of conversation about the ad, according to Open Measures, wasn’t the days following its launch, but rather about two weeks later, between July 30 and August 5, when the conservative amplification was at its highest—and culminating in President Donald Trump commenting on the whole situation and saying he “loved” the ad.
Open Measures further notes, “a larger share of posts discussing the ads that also claimed the ads echoed bigoted ideologies were represented on alt-platforms with predominantly conservative communities than those without, indicating that the claims were more popular with conservative critics of liberals than with liberals themselves.”
There were undoubtedly people levying real and genuine critiques of the American Eagle campaign, but the idea that those voices were somehow exemplary of the entirety of the Left simply doesn’t match up to the data. The Right managed to take a handful of outliers, turn them into the representatives of something bigger, and then spin up an entire effort to push back against that narrative that it amplified in the first place.
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