The Peloton thing was weird but to me is partly an example of the media and twitter fueling themselves.
Commercial comes out in early November and no one notices until some guy retweets it making fun of it a month later. At first it seems that people are just laughing at how dumb it is. We see commercials that portray women poorly or men as idiots all the time but for whatever reason this one really gets a lot of attention.
But then twitter starts ramping up. It goes from people making fun of commercial to people making comments about misogyny, sexism etc. The media then starts running click bait stories about how the commercial is offending people. This makes more and more people on twitter react and share their offence to the commercial. So the media keeps running more and more stories, now using terms like “outrage” and relating the commercial to society wide frustration with how women are portrayed in the media. It’s a vicious cycle. Rinse and repeat.
And then it comes full circle when the company takes a massive hit financially and the actors become victims themselves because they’re facing harassment.
It’s such a bizarre situation that seems to play out time and time again and imo is absolutely an example of manufactured outrage. And then these types of incidents start getting compared to actual events that are offensive and get lumped together as an example of the epidemic of “cancel culture”. There’s no perspective or context to evaluate which things are truly important societal issues and which are media fuelled manufactured events.
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