Increasingly more people see the world through a very limited set of prisms. Lots of people online tend to see everything through racism/sexism/whateverism and will make connections where there are none. It's an easy way to discredit the people you're talking with by inferring meaning.
Critic Zelensky on a specific topic: you're pro Putin
Critic a woman politician: you're sexist
Use a company that used the word "gas", you're obviously antisemitic
Once it's out there on twitter &co nobody will even attempt to verify the facts (in this case the two obvious explanations you provided) and will just parrot the thing ad infinitum
I view it as a failure of education. Education should produce well-rounded people who are happy, tolerant, and calm. Yet the US, for whatever reasons, has been producing these kind of angry, impulsive, and less tolerant students. Ironically, they are also the bunch who are easily subject to hoaxes and can't tell information from opinion.
Some of it is also just the difficulty of differentiating between an intentionally sneaky bit of whatever-ism and an accident. A finance institution using a star of david is borderline enough that any savvy marketing person wouldn't have let that go out. The use of "gas" on top of it is just silly.
There's certainly some amount of what you're pointing out, but given how much of modern politics and communication is done in dog whistles, with people making this level of borderline content and then going "how dare you think I'm intending anything by this accident" when they make an "accident" weekly, it's becoming more important to at least be suspicious of "innocent mistakes" by people who should know better.
A company with this much money and international reach is crazy to do a major branding move and then be shocked that people misinterpret it. It's unfortunate that people assume the worst, but at this point, personally and in business PR, you have to understand that people will assume the worst, so to release something like these anyways is either an intentional choice or negligence.
Increasingly more people see the world through a very limited set of prisms. Lots of people online tend to see everything through racism/sexism/whateverism and will make connections where there are none. It's an easy way to discredit the people you're talking with by inferring meaning.
Critic Zelensky on a specific topic: you're pro Putin
Critic a woman politician: you're sexist
Use a company that used the word "gas", you're obviously antisemitic
Once it's out there on twitter &co nobody will even attempt to verify the facts (in this case the two obvious explanations you provided) and will just parrot the thing ad infinitum