2023

Bud Light’s partnership with Dylan Mulvaney was met with a flood of backlash, angering a lot of people due to her being transgender, and led to boycotts of the product from several country music stars and others who call the brand “woke.”

In the three months following Mulvaney’s partnership video, the 13.9k articles about her and Bud Light received nearly 9.4 million engagements. In the summer we  saw engagements taper off slightly, although conversations online became more centered around  Bud Light’s reputation and revenue loss. You can find our full analysis, including detailed looks at each three-month period, of this crisis in the report.

This was one of the biggest ongoing battles of the year, and maintained its relevance even after the initial surge in interest, with almost 65k articles written during the first three months of the strikes, combining for 3.7 million engagements.

The WGA strike went on for long enough that it’s possible to analyze an extended timeline of coverage. Though the latter half of this time period had a lower peak in public and media interest, the number of articles written was actually greater. You can also find our full analysis of this strike in the report, along with the SAG-AFTRA strike and the UAW strike.

Tesla said that its full self-driving beta software may cause crashes after some high-profile incidents hit the headlines, and almost 363,000 vehicles were recalled as a result.

This was the biggest product recall that we looked at in 2023, with nearly 140k engagements to news about it over two weeks’ time.

The story went on for several days, with the peak not actually coming at the beginning of the story but rather after Microsoft hired Altman and then he returned to OpenAI subsequently.

Normally we see crises last 48 hours or so, as seen elsewhere in this report, but this one saw a solid week of media and public interest as the response and fallout spiraled and continued to play out in public.