Shopee's Philippines ambassador pick put #ByeShopee atop Philippine Twitter

On 29 September 2022, Shopee announced that Filipino actress and singer Toni Gonzaga — who had hosted campaign rallies for president Ferdinand Marcos Jr — was its new brand ambassador. Within a day the announcement made #ByeShopee and #BoycottShopee the top trending hashtags on Twitter in the Philippines, with around 340,000 tweets about the company by Friday morning, and the second-most popular topic was posts urging shoppers to switch to Lazada, the rival platform owned by Alibaba Group.

Shopee's representative told the Philippine Daily Inquirer that Gonzaga was chosen for her 'mass appeal', not her political leanings; Gonzaga told the Philippine Star she was grateful for the mentions and engagements. Marcos had won 59% of the vote in May's election, but opposed by a minority concerned over alleged corruption and human rights abuses during his father's dictatorship — the constituency driving the boycott calls.

The backlash landed on a company already under strain: parent Sea Limited was contending with ballooning losses that had forced layoffs and a retreat from Latin America, and its New York-traded shares were down 76% for the year. Shopee remained the region's top shopping app by average monthly active users, according to data cited from data.ai in Sea's quarterly earnings.

The pick was made for reach, but Gonzaga's fame was inseparable from her role in a contested campaign, so the brand absorbed the campaign's divisiveness.

An e-commerce app serves the whole political spectrum; handing boycotters a concrete symbol (#ByeShopee) gave diffuse discontent a target.

The rival-benefit dynamic amplified the cost — the boycott's call to action was switching to Lazada, a measurable loss rather than abstract anger.

With Sea's shares already down 76% in a year of layoffs, Shopee had no goodwill buffer to absorb a self-inflicted controversy.

An ambassador's mass appeal includes their politics: the brand inherits their polarisation and picks a side whether it means to or not.

A Shopee spokesman was initially unable to comment; the company stuck with its 'mass appeal' explanation while the hashtags ran for days and calls to move to Lazada spread. No withdrawal of the ambassadorship was reported in the material.