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this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2023
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With how the Overton window is shifting far to the right, I’m not sure companies really care anymore if their content is placed next to hateful shit. As long as it generates money it is acceptable.
The only way big brands keep expanding is by finding new audiences to appeal to. Groups who were socially excluded in the past become the next big target demographic as companies reach saturation in other markets.
Having their business be publicly associated with groups who are openly attacking these new frontiers of sales is absolutely something they want to avoid.
Not, you know, because they believe Nazis are bad - they may or may not hold that view - but because Nazis are unpopular.
While that’s how things used to be, the heavy rebranding of white supremacy into this new alt right “anti woke” has made Nazi views a lot more mainstream. One of the most popular “news” networks in North America normalize white supremacist ideology daily to hundreds of millions.
It's still very much the case. The companies that are big enough to need new markets to expand into already have the white supremacists' dollars, and they're not afraid of losing them - their boycotts have not proven to actually involve not buying the products.
White supremacy has been normalized in the US and Canada since their inceptions. These countries are built on a foundation of it. It's not like companies actually care about the white supremacy.
They care about losing black and pink dollars.
They don't care about losing white supremacists' dollars because they're not convinced they will.
Lol I can just imagine them sitting in some dystopian marketing brand meeting analysing target demographics… "It seems one of the biggest growing demographics is young Nazis who now call themselves "alt-right", so Jenny, any ideas on how we can tailor our content to appeal to even more Nazis, while also not upsetting our main demographic of centrist customers who prefer to ignore all politics?"
This is pretty much what already happens, with the main difference that the target group would have a codename or a number. Algorithms don't care.
You laugh but that’s literally what goes on in some meetings. There are entire “tiger teams” that focus on monetization of different demographics.
I do laugh cause I got a strong gallows humour, but you are right and I know that.
I used to work in marketing and now am in IT precisely because I couldn‘t take the dystopian nature of it, and I didn‘t even make it far up or long at all, so I only saw the tip of the iceberg.
For example LGBT in a global company the companies only do that sort of marketing in places where the general culture is friendly towards them and avoid it in those where it isn‘t. Specifically the US came up just a while ago a friend told me in his company they decided on not running pro-LGBT ads there anymore, because the Bud Light thing signals to them a shift in the US culture becoming more hostile towards it and they have to go with that flow.
Yeah, their own ethics may not agree, but also do not matter, just what the company and shareholders demand and that is: more profit at any cost.