A question that has been eating at me recently: Why in the world are conservative boycotts suddenly working?
I mean, in general, politically motivated boycotts rarely work — people get bored or their opponents stage “buycotts” that cancel out their efforts. To the extent boycotts have worked, in recent years it’s tended to be the left using its institutional power against other institutions, like the companies that pressured Indiana into backing off an LGBTQ+ unfriendly religious freedom bill, or the campaigns to get advertisers to pull ads from Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show.
As of this writing, however, Bud Light sales are still down almost 30 percent since Anheuser-Busch decided to partner with trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney; at one distributor, the beer is reportedly selling for less than a case of water. Target recently dialed back its Pride displays, the Los Angeles Dodgers temporarily rescinded an invitation to a controversial LGBTQ+ group, and jurors at an advertising festival were recently instructed to focus on ads that make money, not weighty message advertising.
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I have been puzzled and intrigued, and so for a couple of months I’ve been asking smart people in business, academia and media what’s going on. Over and over, I’ve heard the same answer: “Twitter changed hands.”
Initially, this sounded crazy. The timing is suspicious, I grant, but coincidences happen. And it didn’t look to me as if Twitter was the main vector for attacks on Mulvaney, et al. — they seemed to emanate from conservative sites such as the Daily Wire.
Over time, however, I’ve come around — and what convinced me was watching people try to agree on a Twitter alternative.
First, it was the right fleeing to Gab, Parler or Truth Social, as left-leaning moderators clamped down on Twitter. Then Elon Musk took over, the moderation skew flipped, and progressives began decamping for platforms such as Mastodon, Hive and Bluesky. Each time, there was talk about “the next Twitter,” but each successive hype cycle ended in disappointment, with a small number of users migrating but never a critical mass.
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Now we have Threads, Instagram’s Twitter substitute, which seems like the most plausible successor so far, having garnered 30 million users in its first day. Yet the service still feels distinctly Instagram — vibe happy, image-centric, influencer-driven, quite different from the epigrammatic exchanges that made Twitter so distinctive. Nor do I think it will replicate what was for so many people the central attraction of Twitter: a concentration of powerful public intellectuals and politicians that gave insiders a place to schmooze and outsiders a shot at shaping elite consensus (or at least watching it form in real time).
Mostly it empowered the progressive left. Yes, there were exceptions, notably Donald Trump. But progressives are the ones who spent almost a decade steadily policing Twitter discourse through a combination of cancellation mobs and agitating for more stringent (and left-leaning) moderation policies. Although Twitter had started as an ideological free-for-all — “the free speech wing of the free speech party” — over time, the more tech-savvy, more numerous and better-networked young progressives set the rules of the debate. And because Twitter was the hub of a 24-hour ongoing conversation among a lot of powerful and influential people, that had real-world effects.
Which brings us back to the boycotts. I don’t think Twitter made the boycotts work because that’s where conservatives organized. Rather, I think the Twitter pseudo-consensus caused some irrational corporate behavior — and its collapse caused even more.
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One reason boycotts fail is that major institutions generally avoid taking stances that are guaranteed to make a lot of people very mad. Yet, Twitter Brain convinced a lot of corporate bosses that controversial progressive views were actually quite mainstream. This might explain why Bud Light tried to partner with a trans influencer even though its customer demographic is roughly the opposite of Mulvaney’s “wacky Audrey Hepburn” persona — and triggered a strong enough emotional response to sustain at least three months of boycott.
The Bud Light backlash, and the rightward shift in Twitter’s moderation policies, punctured this illusion. But this meant that suddenly companies were in a position of radical uncertainty: Was this “vibe shifting”? And toward what? I suspect this is why Target panicked about some minor pushback to its Pride displays.
Over time, I assume companies will find a new equilibrium, in part because I don’t think progressives will find a new Twitter. The old Twitter was the creation of a specific time and place — the old open internet, where left and right expected to share certain public forums, however noisily and grudgingly. Dominating these meeting places gave you a fair bid at calling your views “the consensus.”
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But now many progressives want to “deplatform” opposing views, while others object (not unfairly) to the obnoxious conservative counterculture that has developed under the old regime. Once Musk readmitted the views and people they abhor, the left began abandoning the common space for smaller, more ideologically hom*ogeneous services where it is easier to police one another, but harder to police the discourse. And the more peripheral progressives become, the more institutions will grope their way back to the middle of the road.
