Why this yogurt brand will pay you $1,000 to stay off social media until the election is over

What goes best with yogurt for breakfast? According to dairy brand Stonyfield, it just might be a social media sabbatical.

With the Toxic-Free Election Challenge, the company is inviting fans to take October off from social media, and rewarding 100 randomly selected parfait-partakers with $1,000 for their efforts. On the surface, it might not seem like yogurt and politics blend together very well, but Stonyfield claims it makes a lot more sense when you take a closer look beneath the lid.

“Part of the DNA of Stonyfield has always been helping consumers avoid toxins in their day-to-day lives,” says Kristina Drociak, director of PR at Stonyfield. “We’re always trying to find ways to help consumers detoxify their lives, and this year we landed on a new way we could do that.”

Over the course of the brand’s 40-year history, Stonyfield has worked to remove pesticides from playing fields and public parks across the country, and to reduce carbon emissions in their own operations. The company’s comms team is often in search of clever efforts to improve the environment while also underlining Stonyfield yogurt’s inherent wholesomeness. This year, the question arose: What are some other major sources of toxicity?

An internal brainstorming session quickly concluded that one of the most toxic places during this election year, and more or less any year, is social media. Though occasionally still a fun way to keep up with friends, read news, and catch the latest memes, it’s all too often a perennial sludge-festival of hard opinions, gallows “humor,” and rampant misinformation that turns family members and neighbors against one another. (Not to mention all the name-calling, racism, misogyny, and the fact that at any moment you might be arguing with an AI bot.) Clearing out some of that muck for yogurt-lovers just seemed like a timely extension of the brand ethos around toxicity, says Drociak; pesticide-removal, but make it mental health.

“We decided that if we could incentivize people to get off of social media for the month leading up to the election, that might do some good in their lives and maybe do a little good in the world, too,” Drociak says.

The general outlook for social media is currently about as bleak as it’s ever been. Over the summer, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy called for cigarette-like warning labels on social media apps to inform users of their potential harm to a child’s mental health. It’s easy to see why. According to a recent study from computer scientists at Cornell and UC-Berkeley, people tend to interact more with polarizing content, and the algorithms on X, formerly Twitter, increasingly surface posts that amplify anger. The study looked at tweets shown to nearly 1,000 people—on both their news feeds and personalized For You pages—and found an outsize emphasis on tweets with “emotional content,” which in turn provoked an emotional response. Creators on many platforms have used ragebait to increase comments and engagement. Facebook engineers, for instance, were amplifying posts that received more “angry” emojis as recently as 2021. Social media can be a highly combustible environment year-round, but during a particularly volcanic election season, well, the floor is lava.

Instead of leapfrogging across safe harbors to avoid getting scorched, Stonyfield is encouraging fans to take the month leading up to the election off of social media, and rewarding some of them with money. Participants can enter on the brand’s website, as of September 10, and pledge to go Meta-free throughout October. The company will then randomly choose 100 people who will receive $1,000 for the challenge. Folks who take the pledge will be on the honor system; Stonyfield will not be monitoring their social media activity for cheating. (“I’m not sure how we would do that,” Drociak says.) As long as the participants at least try to detoxify their social media usage in a charged political environment, or even think about their usage, everyone wins.

For their part, Stonyfield is not daunted by the idea of getting political, despite the kind of pushback and even boycotts brands like Disney, Target, and Bud Light have received in recent years for their political messaging. Partly, it’s because Stonyfield has a history of political messaging, going back to the messages about gun safety the brand placed beneath yogurt lids in the late-‘90s. But perhaps more importantly, the company is addressing politics in this campaign from a neutral position.

“We’re not saying who to vote for,” Drociak says, before adding, “Although Stonyfield will always say: vote for the climate.”