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Boston Globe
3 days ago
- Politics
- Boston Globe
How the right shaped the debate over the Sydney Sweeney ads
In reality, most progressives weren't worked up much at all. Criticism of the ad campaign had come almost entirely from a smattering of accounts with relatively few followers, according to an analysis of social media data by The New York Times. Conversation about the ad did not escalate online or in traditional media until days later, after right-leaning influencers, broadcasters and politicians began criticizing what they described as a wave of progressive outrage. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up In fact, by the time right-wing users were in an uproar, only a few thousand posts on social platform X mentioned Sweeney, according to data by Tweet Binder, a social media analytics company. Fewer than 10% of those expressed clear criticism of the actress or ad, according to the analysis by the Times, which used artificial intelligence to help flag posts for review. Overall, there were three times as many posts supportive of the campaign and Sweeney on X as there were posts critical of them in the days after the campaign began, the analysis by the Times showed. Advertisement The boiling social media frenzy over the American Eagle campaign has been driven, at least in part, by the public's seemingly insatiable interest in Sweeney. But it also shows how, on today's internet, a controversy can sometimes be described as widespread when it isn't. Instead, people pushing an agenda can cherry-pick from the tens of millions of posts and videos uploaded to social media every day to make their case. Advertisement The political right has become particularly adept at this tactic, cognizant of the way that tapping into hot-button cultural issues can stoke popular anger not just against progressive ideas but against the Democratic Party itself. In the case of the American Eagle ads, the one-sided discourse also appears to have provoked an actual debate: Left-leaning criticism of the campaign rose considerably after the topic gained traction on the right. 'Republicans are going to just keep hammering this because they know that they can find 13 teenagers on TikTok to say something crazy and then turn it into a two-week-long news story,' said Ryan Broderick, the author of Garbage Day, a newsletter about internet culture. American Eagle, which has been struggling financially in the face of inflation and sagging consumer spending, started the campaign with Sweeney on July 23. At the time, Jennifer Foyle, the company's president, described the campaign as a 'winning combo of ease, attitude and a little mischief.' In one spot, Sweeney, who promotes a number of other brands as well, zips up a pair of jeans while saying, in a voice-over, that 'genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality and even eye color.' She adds, 'My jeans are blue.' Advertisement Initial reactions were largely apolitical, though some progressives criticized the ad's sexual overtones while some on the right applauded a return to 'traditional advertising' in what they viewed as a step away from more diverse representations. But on the fringes of sites including TikTok and X, some users began suggesting that the campaign had a more subtle and menacing message tied to eugenics: that blond, blue-eyed looks are somehow superior. 'She has good jeans like she has good GENES! hahahaha like in a nazi way!!' stated a July 25 post on X that drew more than 5 million views. The next day, a video on TikTok that also made a comparison to Nazism drew 3.5 million views. Those, however, appeared to be outliers: Nearly three-quarters of posts that were critical of Sweeney or the ad had fewer than 500 views, data show. Many pro-Trump users amplified the critical posts in reposts and reshares, driving even more attention to posts that would normally reach only a few thousand users. The tide began to shift on July 27, when large right-wing accounts such as Libs of TikTok began reposting critiques of the American Eagle campaign, mocking them as examples of 'triggered' liberals. 'Keep this up Democrats,' posted the account, which is run by a woman named Chaya Raichik and has 4.3 million followers on X. 'This is going to be great for you guys.' Raichik and another right-wing account shared a video from a left-wing TikTok user who had 70,000 followers on the platform. Their reposts were seen more than 4.4 million times on X, far eclipsing the reach of the original post. Advertisement Then came the podcasters. Perhaps prompted by the viral success of posts that defended the American Eagle campaign while attacking left-wing viewpoints, popular podcast hosts including Charlie Kirk, Clay Travis and Michael Knowles jumped on the topic, devoting increasing amounts of airtime to what they described as evidence of a 'brain broken' Democratic culture. Elected Republicans soon followed. 'Now the crazy Left has come out against beautiful women,' Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, posted on July 29. After reports emerged that Sweeney had registered as a Republican in Florida last year, President Donald Trump posted to Truth Social that Sweeney 'has the 'HOTTEST' ad out there' and praised the campaign for not being 'woke.' Absent from the evolving conversation, however, were any elected Democrats condemning the American Eagle spots. 'Has anyone on the left actually attacked the Sweeney ad?' asked a progressive podcaster, Brian Tyler Cohen, who has 600,000 followers on X and 4.6 million subscribers on YouTube, in a post last week as articles were circulating about the uproar. Travis, who has discussed the ads almost every day for the past week on his sports and politics podcast, 'OutKick,' as well as on his nationally syndicated radio show, acknowledged in an interview that elected Democrats had not criticized the ads. But he said the fact that they hadn't forcefully rebutted the complaints about the ads proved that the party was complicit in what he said was a 'woke' culture run amok. 'I haven't seen a single Democrat call out the absurdity,' he said. 'Their silence speaks volumes.' Advertisement At least one elected Democrat, Rep. Eric Swalwell of California, did speak up to defend the ad. In a response to Cruz, Swalwell stated on X that 'attacking the Sydney Sweeney ad is dumb.' Yet his post drew only 60,000 views, compared with 1.2 million for Cruz's post on the ad. Sweeney has not publicly commented on the campaign, and American Eagle has also stayed largely out of the fray, save for an Instagram post late last week that said the campaign 'is and always was about the jeans.' At least in the short term, all the attention hasn't hurt the brand: American Eagle shares are up nearly 26% since the campaign began. The New York Times collected more than 4,000 posts from X mentioning 'Sydney Sweeney' or alternative spellings of her name from July 24-25, 2025. Those posts were reviewed by an artificial intelligence tool to mark them as critical or supportive of the ad campaign and Sweeney, from a scale from 0 to 10. Flagged posts with a score of 5 or higher were then manually reviewed by The New York Times and used to calculate the share of posts that were critical or supportive. This article originally appeared in .
Atlantic
22-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
AI Slop Might Finally Cure Our Internet Addiction
Finding love is hard. For a while, dating apps seemed to make it easier, putting a city's worth of single people in the palm of your hand. But AI has cast a paranoid pall over what can already be a suboptimal experience. If you get a message that feels a little off, it is hard to know whether you are flirting with a bot —or just someone insecure enough to use ChatGPT as their own Cyrano de Bergerac. In frustration, my friend Lonni has started picking up women at the nail salon like it's 1997. Or, in the midst of an emotionally fraught conversation with a friend or family member, a text might read strangely. Is the person on the other end using AI to compose their messages about the fairness of Aunt Beryl's will or the future of your relationship? The only way to find out is to call them or, better yet, meet them for a coffee. Or maybe you want to learn something. Many of the internet's best resources for getting everyday answers are quickly being inundated with the dubious wisdom of AI. YouTube, long a destination for real people who know how to repair toilets, make omelets, or deliver engaging cultural criticism, is getting less human by the day: The newsletter Garbage Day reports that four of May's top 10 YouTube channels were devoted to AI-generated content. Recently, the fastest-growing channel featured AI babies in dangerous situations, for some reason. Reddit is currently overrun with AI-generated posts. Even if you never use ChatGPT or other large language models directly, the rest of the internet is sodden with their output and with real people parroting their hallucinations. Remember: LLMs are still often wrong about basic facts. It is enough to make a person crack a book. The internet's slide toward AI happened quickly and deliberately. Most major platforms have integrated the technology whether users want it or not, just at the moment that some AI photos and videos have become indistinguishable from reality, making it that much harder to trust anything online. Over time, LLMs might get more accurate, or people might simply get better at spotting their tells. In the meantime, a real possibility is that people will turn to the real world as a more trustworthy alternative. We've been telling one another to 'touch grass' for years now, all while downloading app- and website-blocking software and lockable phone safes to try to wean ourselves off constant internet use. Maybe the AI-slop era will actually help us log off. Even before AI started taking over, the internet had been getting less and less fun for a while. Users have been complaining about Google Search degrading for years. Opening an app to get a ride, order takeout, or find a vacation house can be just as expensive and effortful as taking a taxi, calling in a delivery order, or booking a hotel once was. Social media is a grotesque, tragedy-exploiting, MechaHitler-riddled inferno. Where going online once evoked a wide-eyed sense that the world was at our fingertips, now it requires wading into the slop like weary, hardened detectives, attempting to parse the real from the fake. Nevertheless, as AI companies build browsers and devices that keep users tidily contained in an endless conversation with their own personalized AIs, some people may spend more time online than ever. Its accuracy aside, AI is already valued by many for entertainment, practical help, and emotional support. In some extreme cases, users are falling in love with chatbots or drifting into all-consuming spiritual delusions, but many more are simply becoming thoroughly addicted. The internet's new era may push AI skeptics to spend less time online, while another group ramps up their AI-mediated screen time. That split might have implications for the internet's culture—and the culture at large. Even for those who run from the slop, the internet is already so woven into every part of our lives that going cold turkey is pretty much impossible. But as it gets worse, the real world starts to look pretty good in comparison, with its flesh-and-blood people with whom we can establish trust, less overwhelming number of consumer options, slower pace, and occasional moments of unpredictable delight that do not create financial profit for anyone. I have been experimenting with being less online since 2022, when I quit Twitter. As soon as I got through withdrawal, I could feel my attention span start to expand. I started reading books again. Like a lot of people who left social media, more of my socializing moved over to group chats with people I actually know and in-person get-togethers: quick coffees and camping trips and dinner parties. Remember dinner parties? Later, I quit shopping online, and soon realized that I didn't need most of what I had been buying. The majority of the stuff I actually did need, I could get at the grocery store and my local hardware store, which, like most hardware stores, carries tons of things besides wrenches and bolts. Online shopping might have once been more convenient than schlepping to a store, but I think that's no longer true in many cases. Last winter, when my feet were chronically cold under my desk, I could have spent hours researching space heaters online, trying to guess which reviews were real and which were fake; placed an order online; possibly received a broken or substandard unit; and then had to package it back up and take it to some random third-party store in a return process designed to be annoying. Instead, I walked to the hardware store. 'We have one that oscillates and one that doesn't,' the guy in the vest told me. I took the one that oscillates. It works fine. I am not, I hasten to say, completely offline. Like most people, my job requires me to use the internet. But I am online less. And I am happier for it. I get outside more. I garden and read more books. I still follow the news, but less compulsively. Spending some parts of my day without my attention being monetized or my data being harvested is a nice bonus. It makes me feel kind of like a line-dried bedsheet smells. I find myself dreaming about additional returns to offline existence. I live in Portland, Oregon, where we still have lots of movie theaters and even a video-rental place. I could—I might—cancel all my streaming services and just rent stuff and watch movies at the theater. I could even finally assuage my guilt over the lousy way music-streaming services pay musicians and avoid being fooled by AI bands by going back to CDs and records—and by seeing more artists play live. I don't think I'll be the only one reorienting toward physical media and physical presence: books and records, live theater and music, brick-and-mortar stores with knowledgeable salespeople, one long conversation with one real person instead of 300 short interactions with internet strangers who might be robots. Tech companies may assume that the public is so habituated—or even addicted—to doing everything online that people will put up with any amount of risk or unpleasantness to continue to transact business and amuse themselves on the internet. But there is a limit to what at least some of us will take, especially when the alternative has real appeal. One recent study shows that disconnecting your phone from the internet creates a mood boost on par with pharmaceutical antidepressants. And if more people explore offline alternatives—at least until this whole generative-AI explosion works itself out—it could create a feedback loop, livening up cities and communities, which then become a more tempting alternative to screens. What the internet will become in a post-AI world is anybody's guess. Maybe it'll finally become something transcendent. Or maybe, as the conspiracy theory
Yahoo
08-07-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Nate Morris campaign spends big early with seven-figure ad launch in Senate race
Nate Morris is already spending big bucks on his 2026 U.S. Senate campaign — with 10 months to go until the primary election. The Kentucky businessman is launching a seven-figure ad buy that will run in every market statewide, including television, digital and direct mail advertising, according to Morris' spokesperson. The ad, titled "Garbage Day," is critical of outgoing Republican U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell, as well as fellow Republican candidates U.S. Rep. Andy Barr and former Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron. "Mitch McConnell? He's trashed Trump," Morris says in the ad. "McConnell's boys Andy Barr and Daniel Cameron will do the same if they replace him." Representatives for Barr and Cameron's campaign did not immediately respond to a Courier Journal request for comment about the ad. Barr's campaign confirmed he has not launched any television ads. The latest fundraising reports filed with the Federal Election Commission show Cameron raised more than $500,000 for his Senate bid over an about four-week period following his announcement. However, that paled in comparison to the funds Barr had on hand — with reports showing he had more than $5.3 million available as of March 31. The next fundraising reports are due to the FEC on July 15. Morris announced his run for the Senate seat in June on Donald Trump Jr.'s podcast show, "Triggered with Don Jr." He already has support from some nationally known conservatives, including popular media host Charlie Kirk. Kirk and Morris kicked off the campaign at a rally in Shepherdsville on June 30, where Morris branded himself as an outsider and grassroots candidate ready to help advance President Donald Trump's agenda. While Morris has never served in public office, he has previously worked with Republican U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, with POLITICO calling Morris "a door-opener for Paul with big-money GOP donors." The primary election is set to take place on May 19, 2026. This story could be updated. More: 'This administration is going to deal with you': US attorney talks ICE arrests, LMPD and more Reach reporter Hannah Pinski at hpinski@ or follow her on X, formerly known as Twitter, at @hannahpinski. This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Morris campaign spends big early with 7-figure ad launch in Senate race
Axios
27-06-2025
- Business
- Axios
Nate Morris launches quest for McConnell seat with cheeky "Garbage Day" ad
Nate Morris — a pro-Trump entrepreneur who founded a waste-disposal company worth $2 billion — joined the frenzied race to succeed retiring Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) with a cutting but lighthearted ad showing Morris riding on the back of a bouncing garbage truck. "Let's dump career politicians and take out the trash in Washington," Morris says as his "DC SWAMP CLEANUP SERVICES" truck pulls away. The " Garbage Day" ad, first reported by Breitbart's Matt Boyle, says each of Morris' two main rivals for the Republican nomination — U.S. Rep. Andy Barr and former state Attorney General Daniel Cameron — is a "McConnell Puppet." The two-minute video will run as a digital ad and on social media. The backstory: Morris, 44, who lives in Lexington, is the founder and former CEO of Rubicon Technologies, a successful waste and recycling platform he took public in 2022. Morris launched his campaign with a cutting-edge twist, announcing his campaign Thursday on Don Jr.'s podcast, "Triggered." Morris' campaign is run by a trio of Trump-Vance advisers — Andy Surabian, Chris Grant and Tony Fabrizio. The other side: The Barr campaign said in a statement to Axios that Morris is "more of an East Coast liberal than a Kentucky conservative."
