A lot of this is probably stuff everyone knows anyway, but anyhow...
I was looking at digital marketing recently and realised that it's common for companies to have their social media accounts run, not by junior staff, but by external marketing companies.
One well-established digital marketing company is Maven Marketing. From their front page (if you scroll down), it says:
Committed to Diversity and Inclusion.
Maven Marketing & Co. is at the forefront of creating energized and ground-breaking experiences that connect brands to their audience. We are a female and minority owned business dedicated to bringing diversity, inclusion and authenticity to all brand experiences.
...Our goal is to create brand experiences that inspire passion and generate excitement, communicate effectively, and engage the customer in a meaningful and visceral way.
Our work calls for the continual investigation of change - changes in attitudes, lifestyles and aspirations within the global community...
Of course, diversity and inclusion are good things, but how we interpret what that means is important. The founder of Maven, Nichole Creary, has her pronouns on all her social media profiles, so her idea of inclusion involves believing in something - that whether we are male or female is a feeling rather than an objective biological fact - that I believe is noninclusive and harmful to women's rights.
Sprout Social runs many Twitter accounts and from their website a client is quoted as saying Sprout allows us to analyze and track trends on social media to make sure our content is resonating. Elsewhere on the site these analytics are discussed:
Understand your customers’ needs on a deeper level by tapping into the world’s largest and most transparent focus group: social media.
I think there may be a vicious circle happening. If marketing companies are looking at Twitter to study changes in attitudes and lifestyles, they're looking at a very skewed sample.
(Yascha Mounk has talked about how unrepresentative Twitter is here: www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/04/political-leaders-should-stop-caring-about-twitter/588004/)
If they're using that skewed sample to "engage the customer in a meaningful and visceral way", they're amplifying that skewed idea of attitudes. That helps create an idea of certain attitudes being much more widely accepted than they really are, which, humans being what we are, causes a lot of us to adopt those same attitudes without really examining them, or it makes us afraid to challenge those attitudes if we think they're mistaken.
Anyway, I think this is possibly what's happening sometimes when, for example, soap or drink companies suddenly start scolding us about pronoun usage or whatever. This is a very long post, sorry.