If you asked someone to think of the moment that epitomised self-serving brand activism, they would likely pluck an example from the summer of 2020. That was when corporations scrambled to align themselves with the Black Lives Matter movement in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, with fast fashion brands, sportswear retailers and men’s grooming companies asserting their democratic, anti-racist credentials. Most of these initiatives felt gratuitous: whether it was hastily creating half-baked diversity programmes or attaching inclusive slogans to their products. Many – even if only briefly – likely gained new customers under their claimed commitment to social justice.
Five years on, what is the legacy of those initiatives? The last few months has seen a rapid rollback of the measures that fell under the diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) umbrella – a shift that followed the popularity and election of Donald Trump and his own anti-DEI and “anti-woke” agenda. Some of these rollbacks have been major, such as Meta announcing large-scale changes to how it moderates content on its sites (such as Facebook and Instagram), and Google scrapping its drive to hire more staff from under-represented backgrounds and removing references to events like Black History Month and Pride on its calendar apps. But it’s not just Big Tech trying to kiss Trump’s ring: Disney announced last week that it will scale back content warnings that appear before some of its older films, a feature that was introduced in 2019.
These messages, which appeared before children’s films such as Peter Pan and Dumbo, warned that certain movies included “negative depictions and/or mistreatment of people or cultures” and that “these stereotypes were wrong then and are wrong now”. The content flagged in these Disney films is often more jarring than most might think. These children’s movies contain slurs, racist caricatures and blackface, not just in a slim selection but across many popular kids’ films. Beyond Peter Pan and Dumbo, you see it in the Jungle Book, The Aristocats, Lady and the Tramp and in Song of the South (where the racism was so bad it is not available for streaming).
According to the New York Times, a “new disclaimer will warn that the movie ‘may contain stereotypes or negative depictions’ and will not appear as introductory text that plays before the beginning of a film”. Yet making these warnings less visible is a pantomime move that suggests Disney is participating in what seems to be a wider appeasement campaign in Trump’s war on woke.
This indicates a shift – not just in the US, but globally. But how much should we mourn the end of these largely empty gestures? Tiny content warnings – and even supposedly sweeping changes to social media moderation – have had little effect on patriarchy, wealth inequality and white supremacy in the past decade. Suspicion of corporate activism in 2025 is necessary. But, just as these changes were introduced to reflect a social trend in 2020, they are being dropped now for the very same reason.
Content warnings may do little to change someone’s mind about what they’re about to see, but they do serve their titular function: warning viewers about something alarming tucked into an animated film, providing them with a choice about whether or not they want to encounter it.
The ramifications in tech and media are far more serious than diminished content warnings, where the few, limp handrails in place to protect marginalised groups from hate and harassment are now almost non-existent. But that doesn’t mean these small retreats, such as Disney’s, should be discounted. Rather, we should see pointless gestures as we should have seen them in 2020: helpful reminders that these companies have no ideological aims beyond whatever best serves them in the political moment.
Meaningful cultural shifts and carefully constructed DEI initiatives is where we might see real progress outside of lip service in popular culture. As the author and journalist Nesrine Malik wrote about the end of DEI last year: “The legacy of Black Lives Matter cannot be worked out within the balance sheet of a tech company.” The removal of content warnings helps no one – but also means very little at all to taking social justice causes forward. We should be clear-eyed about what it is that can actually change people’s minds, and what it is that marks the end of something which never meant much in the first place.
[See more: Of course Rishi Sunak is English]
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