Outrage on the Internet

Recent high profile events show that a type of political consumerism can be effective.  For example, the Clipper's owner Donald Sterling has come under fire for some racist comments he made.  Many basketball players and coaches have spoken out against it and are calling for action such as boycotting of Clippers games.  The CEO of RadiumOne, a large online advertising company, recently had to step down after being found guilty of domestic abuse.  The Mozilla CEO also had to step down after furor over his donation to Proposition 8, the campaign against legalizing gay marriage.  What's interesting about these controversies are that many of the people who objected aren't end consumers but rather employees (like basketball players) or other companies.  It seemed that the leadership of other companies were motivated to speak out because of the attitudes of their employees.  Is political consumerism more effective when the employees are more powerful?  The employees in these cases were basketball players or software developers.  Many of Mozilla and RadiumOne's downstream consumers are also in the tech industry.  Both of these groups happen to be in extremely high demand.  Large public forums (eg. Twitter) seemed to facilitate these events.