Is the Sydney Sweeney controversy proof that cancel culture is truly over?

Last week, an American Eagle campaign starring Sydney Sweeney sent my social feed into meltdown. In the ads, the actor is depicted as she always is: blond, charming, and gorgeous. We see her in various short video clips, playing with a dog and fixing a car engine. Each ends with the same slogan: “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.”

A few of the ads were more provocative. “My body’s composition is determined by my genes,” Sweeney says in one video that has now been deleted from American Eagle’s social-media profiles. In another, she explains, “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair colour, personality, and even eye colour.” When the camera pans to Sweeney’s eyes, she says, “My jeans are blue.” These ads drew comparisons to Brooke Shields’s infamous 1980 Calvin Klein commercial, in which the denim-clad actor—then just 15 years old—recites various claims about genetics and “selective mating” and “natural selection.”

In response, some accused American Eagle and its blond, blue-eyed spokeswoman of participating in racist dog whistles and promoting “eugenics” and even “Nazi propaganda.” According to analysis by The New York Times, the backlash was driven by a “smattering of accounts with relatively few followers,” but it was enough to spark right-wing fury, plus a cycle of think pieces and threads that felt quintessentially mid-2010s. The whole thing recalled Kendall Jenner’s disastrous Pepsi campaign, and I expected a similar crisis-PR response: a swift retraction, followed by a sombre apology from Sweeney on the Instagram grid. But that’s not how it went at all, because what happened next upended the standard script. In fact, the fallout makes me think that cancel culture could be over for good—and not for the reasons you might think.

The phrase “cancel culture” entered the mainstream lexicon in the late 2010s. It refers to the practice of withdrawing support from people, often public figures, because of things they’ve said or done, leaving them “cancelled” like a discontinued TV show. But the definition has always been problematically slippery. In 2020, President Trump used it while defending Mount Rushmore during a Fourth of July speech, which highlights one major problem with the term: It’s so open-ended that it can be applied to anything from national landmarks to convicted criminals, disgraced politicians, adulterous CEOs (and their HR directors), beauty influencers, Katy Perry, and internet villains like Amy Cooper—a.k.a. “Central Park Karen.”

It’s hard to pin down the impact of cancellation, though, because we often hear public figures complaining that they’ve been cancelled to wide audiences on large media platforms, which seems to disprove the point. These inconsistencies have led to much debate over the last few years about whether cancel culture is effective—or whether it even exists at all.
 

Politically, the right has characterised cancel culture as a creation of the censorious “woke” left. One might argue that right-wingers have no problem trying to silence their critics. And that the concept of cancellation actually has plenty of detractors on the left, who argue that it can easily descend into a self-righteous form of bullying or pile-ons that are counterproductive—but regardless, conservatives are now claiming victory over it.

There is some evidence of a vibe shift, especially since the 2022 purchase of Twitter (now X) by “free speech absolutist” Elon Musk, followed by the election of Trump in 2024. Days before Trump’s inauguration, a servile Mark Zuckerberg announced changes to Meta’s moderation guidelines, allowing users to call LGBTQ+ people “mentally ill,” amongst other things. And the floodgates seem to have opened in the corporate world, too, with a widely shared quote from a top banker in the Financial Times summing up the cultural moment: “I feel liberated. We can say ‘r*****’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled … it’s a new dawn.”

Last week, the White House wasted no time getting involved in Sweeney-gate. Trump’s communications manager, Steven Cheung, called the controversy “cancel culture run amok,” posting: “This warped, moronic, and dense liberal thinking is a big reason why Americans voted the way they did in 2024.” Soon, right-wing figures like Megyn Kelly and Matt Walsh leapt to Sweeney’s defence. On my social feed, at least, I saw more posts about the criticism than actual criticism. There was a sense that even if some of the language in the ads was questionable, the backlash was over-the-top and might actually stem from a weird obsession with Sweeney’s body, or what she has called “misinterpretations” about her family background.

Then, the tone of the discussion online changed yet again when it was reported that Sweeney registered to vote as a Republican in 2024. The actress herself didn’t deny the claim or attempt to clarify, and the revelation sent the MAGA world into overdrive, with the White House and Trump himself posting several times. “Sydney Sweeney, a registered Republican, has the HOTTEST ad out there,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post. “Go get ’em, Sydney!” And now, the share price of American Eagle has soared by 23 per cent.

Watching the response to Sweeney’s ad campaign, it’s easy to see why the right would feel jubilant. Up until now, Republican celebrities have mostly been weird old men like Kid Rock or erratic figures like Azealia Banks. Sweeney stars in critically acclaimed and award-winning shows. She has young fans. She’s cool. (Her next film, Americana, is actually being released later this week.) And while being a Republican is still transgressive in Hollywood, Sweeney’s star power doesn’t appear to be damaged by the claim that she is one, suggesting that we’re entering an era where this type of politicised controversy is less incompatible with mainstream celebrity.

For its part, American Eagle put out a carefully worded statement saying that the campaign “is and always was about the jeans.” But prior to the rollout, the brand’s chief marketing officer, Craig Brommers, told trade media publications that the ads featured “clever, even provocative language” and were “definitely going to push buttons.” It’s unclear how deliberately the brand sought out the level of drama that followed, but it seems to have benefited from it regardless.

It’s undeniable that there has been a rightward political tilt since the 2024 election, but I think the decline of cancel culture has its roots in much longer-running digital trends. Social media has become increasingly fragmented, with users segregating themselves on different platforms. Often, this is split across generational lines: Boomers and Gen X congregate most on Facebook, Instagram is the millennial kingdom, and Gen Z dominates TikTok and Snapchat. But people also gravitate toward the platforms that best suit their politics. Before Musk bought Twitter and reinstated many who had been previously banned, far-right users were flocking to platforms like Gab. And now, whether it’s on the liberal haven of Bluesky or Trump’s very own Truth Social, it’s easy for people to disappear into their preferred reality.

Social-media echo chambers are not new, but the disconnect we’re now seeing goes beyond that. In the 2023 book Doppleganger, Naomi Klein calls this the “mirror world”—a world fueled by the desire for online attention, where users prioritise personal branding and clout-chasing over genuine engagement with complex issues, leading to the blurring of reality and perceived reality. This fracturing of the mainstream creates the situation where it’s difficult to “cancel” people in the same way, because if someone is a villain on one platform, then that person will likely be the hero of someone else’s. On TikTok, Sweeney was being accused of Nazism. But on X? She was America’s sweetheart.

This splintering of reality has been underway for some time, but it accelerated during the pandemic. I noticed it most intensely during the Amber Heard vs. Johnny Depp trial in 2022, where a split in public opinion was made more heated by the army of bots and partisan creators creating content around it. More recently, we’ve seen a similar situation in the legal dispute between Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni. Writing for Zeteo, Taylor Lorenz argued that the case had become a gateway for right-wing content, with conservative commentators leveraging the dispute to dismantle support for #MeToo and gain unprecedented audience growth.

And in an attention economy, where having eyes on you for any reason can be monetised, it’s much harder for a firestorm around anyone to have a negative effect—at least financially. Take disgraced former congressman George Santos, for example. Before he was sent to prison, Santos made over $400,000 on Cameo, appeared on high-profile podcasts, and hosted his own with celebrity guests. While interviewing Santos on her podcast, Ziwe Fumudoh asked him a question on a lot of people’s minds: “What can we do to get you to go away?” He replied: “Stop inviting me to your gigs.… But you can’t, ’cause people want the content.”

MAGA fanboy Matt Gaetz also launched a Cameo account, charging fans $500 for personalised videos, after a House ethics report stated that he paid “tens of thousands” for sex and drugs. Whether it’s OnlyFans stars creating rage-bait out of sleeping with hundreds of men in a day or someone like Russell Brand continuing to post daily videos on Rumble—a YouTube alternative that describes itself as “immune to cancel culture”—as he denies rape charges, the creator economy is a place where all types of attention can be converted to cash, with fewer rules than ever.

Even if public outcry is becoming a less effective method of accountability, digital spaces are still filled with anger on all sides. I think that’s part of what made the Sydney Sweeney controversy dominate the news cycle for multiple weeks. It’s not just about what the ads implied (or didn’t imply, depending on who you were listening to). It was also about underlying anxiety about the changing rules and power dynamics of the internet. It’s no longer clear where the line is online—or what can be done when someone crosses it—and that’s pretty nerve-wracking to a lot of people.

Still, it’s also worth thinking about why the relatively small-scale backlash against Sweeney was deliberately inflated. Watching the right-wing #content machine defending its new heroine and declaring victory against the “woke” mob, I was reminded of Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action, a recently aired Netflix docuseries about The Jerry Springer Show. During its 27-season run, the talk show displayed the worst excesses of reality television and catered to our most juvenile impulses. Springer’s guests, who were often vulnerable people, confessed to all kinds of terrible things as audiences jeered and encouraged them to physically fight. The show was ancelled (there’s that word again) in 2018, but now, when I scroll through a timeline filled with rage-bait—violence, racism, AI-generated slop—it feels like we’re all living in one of its episodes, being simultaneously degraded and distracted by the spectacle.

All images: Getty Images

This article originally appeared on harpersbazaar.com


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