Conservatives have seen success with boycotts in the past year, but seem disinclined to take on Google, even after the Gemini boondoggle.

By Jennifer Graham

It’s been a year since Bud Light sent Dylan Mulvaney a can of beer with an image of the transgender activist on it, resulting in a boycott that reportedly cost Anheuser-Busch InBev more than $1 billion in sales.

Social conservatives felt betrayed by the partnership between Mulvaney and the nation’s best-selling beer and punched back with the most powerful weapon they had: their money. “Go woke, go broke” became a rallying cry on social media, as a video of singer Kid Rock shooting Bud Light cans went viral. It wasn’t long before people began calling for other companies, like Target, to be “Bud Lighted” for any sort of management practice or product brand that seemed solidly left of center.

It was a strategy that worked. A year later, Bud Light’s sales are still down, despite Donald Trump’s urging to let bygones be bygones, and conservatives are still trolling the brand on X.

Which makes it all the more surprising that Google hasn’t been Bud Lighted.

The tech giant has been at odds with conservatives for more than a decade; Utah Sen. Mike Lee has been sparring with Google throughout his Senate career. Google has been accused of blocking conservative email in Gmail and suppressing conservative content in its search engine and on YouTube. Deseret News’s Jacob Hess has shown how Google’s search results can dramatically differ from other search engines on topics such as abortion. And the absurd ahistorical images that its AI-powered image generator Gemini turned out last month, which Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle called “aspirationally overrepresentative,” were the very definition of “woke.” Had Walmart put those pictures on a line of T-shirts, half the country would be Bud Lighting Walmart right now.

In their mea culpas, Google executives called the images that Gemini generated “embarrassing and wrong.” And the company’s quick acknowledgment of the problem we all saw surely helped keep outrage in check. But there’s more to it than that.

https://www.deseret.com/opinion/2024/03/26/google-boycott-gemini-bud-light-target-dylan-mulvaney/