Hi Remarkl, thanks for your comment. I think if you look at the numbers, most traffic on Twitter is generated by a small number of very heavy users. And the fact that something is trending on Twitter doesn't really tell you the level of engagement it's generating, since re-tweeting is so easy. In other words, I think it would be a mistake for any business to read too much into the apparent popularity of a tweet or hashtag.

If they do - and this is something I plan to write about at length in a subsequent story - it is only because personalized marketing strategies have led them to build their business models around tying products and services to people's identities, making them much more sensitive to identity politics than they were in the past. But that's kind of on them.