Is Starbucks “funding a genocide”? If you spend time on TikTok, you could be forgiven for thinking so, given that viral video after viral video has parroted this claim as part of a social media campaign targeting the company over its alleged support for Israel’s war in Gaza.

But this widespread belief has no basis in reality. It still may be hurting the company, however, which reportedly performed disastrously in the most recent quarter, in part due to declining customer traffic, and has had to slash jobs in its Middle East locations. It’s impossible to say from the outside how much of this is related to the boycotts, yet they certainly can’t be helping.

Of course, people should have the right to boycott any company with which they disagree. The problem in this situation is that they’re doing so based on beliefs that simply aren’t true.

As the company has repeatedly clarified, Starbucks does not fund the Israeli government or the Israeli military in any way, shape, or form. It does not even have locations in Israel anymore, having closed down its last locations in 2003. Heck, Starbucks even donated $3 million to food relief for Gaza! But none of these pesky facts have seemed to slow down the social media misinformation parade.

To be fair, there’s one piece of the Starbucks boycott narrative that does have some basis in fact, although even it routinely gets distorted. Many activists are upset with Starbucks for supposedly cracking down on its employee union for simply putting out a statement expressing solidarity with the Palestinian people’s plight.

What actually happened is significantly more complicated.

On Oct. 7, 2023, news was breaking that Hamas terrorists had invaded Israel and were engaged in a slaughter that would ultimately leave 1,200 Israelis, mostly civilians, dead. That very day, the official social media accounts for Starbucks Workers United posted an image of a bulldozer breaking through Israel’s border wall and wrote, “Solidarity with Palestine!”

At best, this tone-deaf statement implies indifference to the civilians who were being killed at the time of its posting, and at worst, it implies support for Hamas’s terrorist tactics. Starbucks responded by condemning the union and condemning the violence of Oct. 7, and it later sued the union, demanding it stop using the name “Starbucks” and the Starbucks logo in its branding. 

“Unfortunately, as violence against the innocent in the region continues to escalate, some people are mistakenly tying these remarks to us, because Workers United and its affiliates and members continue to use our name, logo and intellectual property,” a letter from Starbucks reads. “The ongoing confusion from this misinformation has sadly led directly to incidents where angry, hurt customers are confronting partners in our stores and sending graphic and violent messages to partners in our Customer Contact Center.”

Starbucks’s argument was simple: Say whatever controversial things about the conflict you like, but don’t use our name and trademarked branding to do so!

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That’s it. While this should seem perfectly reasonable to a rational person, that’s all Starbucks has done supposedly to justify the “pro-genocide” smear that has spread across TikTok and other social media platforms.

Modern progressives love to decry the spread of “misinformation” by conservatives and Republicans. But they have systematically engaged in one of the worst misinformation campaigns against Starbucks and smeared an American company, potentially inflicting significant economic damage, with claims that are objectively untrue and easily debunked with a Google search.

Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is an independent journalist, YouTuber, and co-founder of BASEDPolitics.