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 mentioni

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