Corporate solidarity gestures can provoke activist backlash when company practices contradict them
Evidence
Much in a similar manner, BLM activists fiercely condemned solidarity statements about police reform made by companies such as Amazon, whose facial recognition software was used by many of the country’s police departments (using an algorithm that caused controversy over disproportionately misidentified crime perpetrators in communities of color). Amazon’s corporate instinct to publicly support BLM and adopting the movement’s logo on its Instagram and Twitter accounts led to a wave of activist attacks on these very media, voicing a rejection of the company’s pernicious duplicity.
— Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 724
Categorization
XREF: Connects to Chapter 7’s broader argument about how speculation and counter-speculation movements respond to corporate co-optation. — connects to: Corporate apologies for racism often substitute gestures for structural change — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1489; Material incentives harden sacred-value conflicts while symbolic gestures soften them; Corporate marketing language can be weaponized back against the company that wrote it. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 937 (+1 more)