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The Argument Against Cancel Culture

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Americans and ‘Cancel Culture’: Where Some See Calls for Accountability, Others See Censorship, Punishment

People have challenged each other’s views for much of human history . But the internet – particularly social media – has changed how, when and where these kinds of interactions occur. The number of people who can go online and call out others for their behavior or words is immense, and it’s never been easier to summon groups to join the public fray .

The phrase  “cancel culture” is said to have originated  from a relatively obscure slang term – “cancel,” referring to  breaking up with someone  – used in a 1980s song. This term was then referenced in film and television and later evolved and gained traction on social media. Over the past several years, cancel culture has become a deeply contested idea in the nation’s political discourse . There are plenty of debates over what it is and what it means, including whether it’s a way to hold people accountable, or a tactic to punish others unjustly, or a mix of both. And some argue that cancel culture doesn’t even exist .

To better understand how the U.S. public views the concept of cancel culture, Pew Research Center asked Americans in September 2020 to share – in their own words – what they think the term means and, more broadly, how they feel about the act of calling out others on social media. The survey finds a public deeply divided, including over the very meaning of the phrase.

Pew Research Center has a long history of studying the tone and nature of online discourse as well as emerging internet phenomena. This report focuses on American adults’ perceptions of cancel culture and, more generally, calling out others on social media. For this analysis, we surveyed 10,093 U.S. adults from Sept. 8 to 13, 2020. Everyone who took part is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the  ATP’s methodology .

This essay primarily focuses on responses to three different open-ended questions and includes a number of quotations to help illustrate themes and add nuance to the survey findings. Quotations may have been lightly edited for grammar, spelling and clarity. Here are the  questions used for this essay , along with responses, and its  methodology .

Who’s heard of ‘cancel culture’?

As is often the case when a new term enters the collective lexicon, public awareness of the phrase “cancel culture” varies – sometimes widely – across demographic groups.

Overall, 44% of Americans say they have heard at least a fair amount about the phrase, including 22% who have heard a great deal, according to the Center’s survey of 10,093 U.S. adults, conducted Sept. 8-13, 2020. Still, an even larger share (56%) say they’ve heard nothing or not too much about it, including 38% who have heard nothing at all. (The survey was fielded before a string of recent conversations and controversies about cancel culture.)

Familiarity with the term varies with age. While 64% of adults under 30 say they have heard a great deal or fair amount about cancel culture, that share drops to 46% among those ages 30 to 49 and 34% among those 50 and older.

There are gender and educational differences as well. Men are more likely than women to be familiar with the term, as are those who have a bachelor’s or advanced degree when compared with those who have lower levels of formal education. 1

While discussions around cancel culture can be highly partisan, Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents are no more likely than Republicans and GOP-leaning independents to say they have heard at least a fair amount about the phrase (46% vs. 44%). (All references to Democrats and Republicans in this analysis include independents who lean to each party.)

When accounting for ideology, liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans are more likely to have heard at least a fair amount about cancel culture than their more moderate counterparts within each party. Liberal Democrats stand out as most likely to be familiar with the term.

How do Americans define ‘cancel culture’?

As part of the survey, respondents who had heard about “cancel culture” were given the chance to explain in their own words what they think the term means.

The most common responses by far centered around accountability. Some 49% of those familiar with the term said it describes actions people take to hold others accountable: 2

A small share who mentioned accountability in their definitions also discussed how these actions can be misplaced, ineffective or overtly cruel.

Some 14% of adults who had heard at least a fair amount about cancel culture described it as a form of censorship, such as a restriction on free speech or as history being erased:

A similar share (12%) characterized cancel culture as mean-spirited attacks used to cause others harm:

Five other distinct descriptions of the term cancel culture also appeared in Americans’ responses: people canceling anyone they disagree with, consequences for those who have been challenged, an attack on traditional American values, a way to call out issues like racism or sexism, or a misrepresentation of people’s actions. About one-in-ten or fewer described the phrase in each of these ways.

There were some notable partisan and ideological differences in what the term cancel culture represents. Some 36% of conservative Republicans who had heard the term described it as actions taken to hold people accountable, compared with roughly half or more of moderate or liberal Republicans (51%), conservative or moderate Democrats (54%) and liberal Democrats (59%).

Conservative Republicans who had heard of the term were more likely than other partisan and ideological groups to see cancel culture as a form of censorship. Roughly a quarter of conservative Republicans familiar with the term (26%) described it as censorship, compared with 15% of moderate or liberal Republicans and roughly one-in-ten or fewer Democrats, regardless of ideology. Conservative Republicans aware of the phrase were also more likely than other partisan and ideological groups to define cancel culture as a way for people to cancel anyone they disagree with (15% say this) or as an attack on traditional American society (13% say this).

Click here to explore more definitions and explanations of the term cancel culture .

Does calling people out on social media represent accountability or unjust punishment?

Given that cancel culture can mean different things to different people, the survey also asked about the more general act of calling out others on social media for posting content that might be considered offensive – and whether this kind of behavior is more likely to hold people accountable or punish those who don’t deserve it.

Overall, 58% of U.S. adults say in general, calling out others on social media is more likely to hold people accountable, while 38% say it is more likely to punish people who don’t deserve it. But views differ sharply by party. Democrats are far more likely than Republicans to say that, in general, calling people out on social media for posting offensive content holds them accountable (75% vs. 39%). Conversely, 56% of Republicans – but just 22% of Democrats – believe this type of action generally punishes people who don’t deserve it.

Within each party, there are some modest differences by education level in these views. Specifically, Republicans who have a high school diploma or less education (43%) are slightly more likely than Republicans with some college (36%) or at least a bachelor’s degree (37%) to say calling people out for potentially offensive posts is holding people accountable for their actions. The reverse is true among Democrats: Those with a bachelor’s degree or more education are somewhat more likely than those with a high school diploma or less education to say calling out others is a form of accountability (78% vs. 70%).

Among Democrats, roughly three-quarters of those under 50 (73%) as well as those ages 50 and older (76%) say calling out others on social media is more likely to hold people accountable for their actions. At the same time, majorities of both younger and older Republicans say this action is more likely to punish people who didn’t deserve it (58% and 55%, respectively).

People on both sides of the issue had an opportunity to explain why they see calling out others on social media for potentially offensive content as more likely to be either a form of accountability or punishment. We then coded these answers and grouped them into broad areas to frame the key topics of debates.

Initial coding schemes for each question were derived from reading though the open-ended responses and identifying common themes. Using these themes, coders read each response and coded up to three themes for each response. (If a response mentioned more than three themes, the first three mentioned were coded.)

After all the responses were coded, similarities and groupings among codes both within and across the two questions about accountability and punishment became apparent. As such, answers were grouped into broad areas that framed the biggest points of disagreement between these two groups.

We identified five key areas of disagreement in respondents’ arguments for why they held their views of calling out others, broken down as follows:

• 25% of all adults address topics related to whether people who call out others are rushing to judge or are trying to be helpful
• 14% center on whether calling out others on social media is a productive behavior
• 10% focus on whether free speech or creating a comfortable environment online is more important
• 8% address the differing agendas of those who call out others
• 4% focus on whether speaking up is the best action to take if people find content offensive.

For the codes that make up each of these areas, see the Appendix .

Some 17% of Americans who say that calling out others on social media holds people accountable say it can be a teaching moment that helps people learn from their mistakes and do better in the future. Among those who say calling out others unjustly punishes them, a similar share (18%) say it’s because people are not taking the context of a person’s post or the intentions behind it into account before confronting that person.

In all, five types of arguments most commonly stand out in people’s answers. A quarter of all adults mention topics related to whether people who call out others are rushing to judge or are trying to be helpful; 14% center on whether calling out others on social media is a productive behavior or not; 10% focus on whether free speech or creating a comfortable environment online is more important; 8% address the perceived agendas of those who call out others; and 4% focus on whether speaking up is the best action to take if people find content offensive.

Are people rushing to judge or trying to be helpful?

The most common area of opposing arguments about calling out other people on social media arises from people’s differing perspectives on whether people who call out others are rushing to judge or instead trying to be helpful.

One-in-five Americans who see this type of behavior as a form of accountability point to reasons that relate to how helpful calling out others can be. For example, some explained in an open-ended question that they associate this behavior with moving toward a better society or educating others on their mistakes so they can do better in the future. Conversely, roughly a third (35%) of those who see calling out other people on social media as a form of unjust punishment cite reasons that relate to people who call out others being rash or judgmental. Some of these Americans see this kind of behavior as overreacting or unnecessarily lashing out at others without considering the context or intentions of the original poster. Others emphasize that what is considered offensive can be subjective.

Is calling out others on social media productive behavior?

The second most common source of disagreement centers on the question of whether calling out others can solve anything: 13% of those who see calling out others as a form of punishment touch on this issue in explaining their opinion, as do 16% who see it as a form of accountability. Some who see calling people out as unjust punishment say it solves nothing and can actually make things worse. Others in this group question whether social media is a viable place for any productive conversations or see these platforms and their culture as inherently problematic and sometimes toxic. Conversely, there are those who see calling out others as a way to hold people accountable for what they post or to ensure that people consider the consequences of their social media posts.

Which is more important, free speech or creating a comfortable environment online?

Pew Research Center has studied the tension between free speech and feeling safe online for years, including the increasingly partisan nature of these disputes. This debate also appears in the context of calling out content on social media. Some 12% of those who see calling people out as punishment explain – in their own words – that they are in favor of free speech on social media. By comparison, 10% of those who see it in terms of accountability believe that things said in these social spaces matter, or that people should be more considerate by thinking before posting content that may be offensive or make people uncomfortable.

What’s the agenda behind calling out others online?

Another small share of people mention the perceived agenda of those who call out other people on social media in their rationales for why calling out others is accountability or punishment. Some people who see calling out others as a form of accountability say it’s a way to expose social ills such as misinformation, racism, ignorance or hate, or a way to make people face what they say online head-on by explaining themselves. In all, 8% of Americans who see calling out others as a way to hold people accountable for their actions voice these types of arguments.

Those who see calling others out as a form of punishment, by contrast, say it reflects people canceling anyone they disagree with or forcing their views on others. Some respondents feel people are trying to marginalize White voices and history. Others in this group believe that people who call out others are being disingenuous and doing so in an attempt to make themselves look good. In total, these types of arguments were raised by 9% of people who see calling out others as punishment. 

Should people speak up if they are offended?

Arguments for why calling out others is accountability or punishment also involve a small but notable share who debate whether calling others out on social media is the best course of action for someone who finds a particular post offensive. Some 5% of people who see calling out others as punishment say those who find a post offensive should not engage with the post. Instead, they should take a different course of action, such as removing themselves from the situation by ignoring the post or blocking someone if they don’t like what that person has to say. However, 4% of those who see calling out others as a form of accountability believe it is imperative to speak up because saying nothing changes nothing.

Beyond these five main areas of contention, some Americans see shades of gray when it comes to calling out other people on social media and say it can be difficult to classify this kind of behavior as a form of either accountability or punishment. They note that there can be great variability from case to case, and that the efficacy of this approach is by no means uniform: Sometimes those who are being called out may respond with heartfelt apologies but others may erupt in anger and frustration.

Acknowledgments – Appendix – Methodology – Topline

What Americans say about cancel culture and calling out others on social media

Below, we have gathered a selection of quotes from three open-ended survey questions that address two key topics. Americans who’ve heard of the term cancel culture were asked to define what it means to them. After answering a closed-ended question about whether calling out others on social media was more likely to hold people accountable for their actions or punish people who didn’t deserve it, they were asked to explain why they held this view – that is, they were either asked why they saw it as accountability or why they saw it as punishment.

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The second wave of “cancel culture”

How the concept has evolved to mean different things to different people.

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“Cancel culture,” as a concept, feels inescapable. The phrase is all over the news, tossed around in casual social media conversation; it’s been linked to everything from free speech debates to Mr. Potato Head .

It sometimes seems all-encompassing, as if all forms of contemporary discourse must now lead, exhaustingly and endlessly, either to an attempt to “cancel” anyone whose opinions cause controversy or to accusations of cancel culture in action, however unwarranted.

In the rhetorical furor, a new phenomenon has emerged: the weaponization of cancel culture by the right.

Across the US, conservative politicians have launched legislation seeking to do the very thing they seem to be afraid of: Cancel supposedly left-wing businesses, organizations, and institutions; see, for example, national GOP figures threatening to punish Major League Baseball for standing against a Georgia voting restrictions law by removing MLB’s federal antitrust exemption.

Meanwhile, Fox News has stoked outrage and alarmism over cancel culture, including trying to incite Gen X to take action against the nebulous problem. Tucker Carlson, one of the network’s most prominent personalities, has emphatically embraced the anti-cancel culture discourse, claiming liberals are trying to cancel everything from Space Jam to the Fourth of July .

The idea of canceling began as a tool for marginalized communities to assert their values against public figures who retained power and authority even after committing wrongdoing — but in its current form, we see how warped and imbalanced the power dynamics of the conversation really are.

All along, debate about cancel culture has obscured its roots in a quest to attain some form of meaningful accountability for public figures who are typically answerable to no one. But after centuries of ideological debate turning over questions of free speech, censorship, and, in recent decades, “political correctness,” it was perhaps inevitable that the mainstreaming of cancel culture would obscure the original concerns that canceling was meant to address. Now it’s yet another hyperbolic phase of the larger culture war.

The core concern of cancel culture — accountability — remains as crucial a topic as ever. But increasingly, the cancel culture debate has become about how we communicate within a binary, right versus wrong framework. And a central question is not whether we can hold one another accountable, but how we can ever forgive.

Cancel culture has evolved rapidly to mean very different things to different people

It’s only been about six years since the concept of “cancel culture” began trickling into the mainstream. The phrase has long circulated within Black culture, perhaps paying homage to Nile Rodgers’s 1981 single “Your Love Is Cancelled.” As I wrote in my earlier explainer on the origins of cancel culture , the concept of canceling a whole person originated in the 1991 film New Jack City and percolated for years before finally emerging online among Black Twitter in 2014 thanks to an episode of Love and Hip-Hop: New York. Since then, the term has undergone massive shifts in meaning and function.

Early on, it most frequently popped up on social media, as people attempted to collectively “cancel,” or boycott, celebrities they found problematic. As a term with roots in Black culture, it has some resonance with Black empowerment movements, as far back as the civil rights boycotts of the 1950s and ’60s . This original usage also promotes the idea that Black people should be empowered to reject cultural figures or works that spread harmful ideas. As Anne Charity Hudley, the chair of linguistics of African America at the University of California Santa Barbara, told me in 2019 , “When you see people canceling Kanye, canceling other people, it’s a collective way of saying, ‘We elevated your social status, your economic prowess, [and] we’re not going to pay attention to you in the way that we once did. ... ‘I may have no power, but the power I have is to [ignore] you.’”

As the logic behind wanting to “cancel” specific messages and behaviors caught on, many members of the public, as well as the media, conflated it with adjacent trends involving public shaming, callouts, and other forms of public backlash . (The media sometimes refers to all of these ideas collectively as “ outrage culture .”) But while cancel culture overlaps and aligns with many related ideas, it’s also always been inextricably linked to calls for accountability.

As a concept, cancel culture entered the mainstream alongside hashtag-oriented social justice movements like #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo — giant social waves that were effective in shifting longstanding narratives about victims and criminals, and in bringing about actual prosecutions in cases like those of Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein . It is also frequently used interchangeably with “woke” political rhetoric , an idea that is itself tied to the 2014 rise of the Black Lives Matter protests. In similar ways, both “wokeness” and “canceling” are tied to collectivized demands for more accountability from social systems that have long failed marginalized people and communities.

But over the past few years, many right-wing conservatives, as well as liberals who object to more strident progressive rhetoric, have developed the view that “cancel culture” is a form of harassment intended to silence anyone who sets a foot out of line under the nebulous tenets of “woke” politics . So the idea now represents a vast assortment of objectives and can hold wildly different connotations, depending on whom you’re talking to.

Taken in good faith, the concept of “canceling” a person is really about questions of accountability — about how to navigate a social and public sphere in which celebrities, politicians, and other public figures who say or do bad things continue to have significant platforms and influence. In fact, actor LeVar Burton recently suggested the entire idea should be recast as “consequence culture.”

“I think it’s misnamed,” Burton told the hosts of The View . “I think we have a consequence culture. And that consequences are finally encompassing everybody in the society, whereas they haven’t been ever in this country.”

. @levarburton : “In terms of cancel culture, I think it’s misnamed. I think we have a consequence culture and consequences are finally encompassing everybody.” #TheView pic.twitter.com/jDQ9HEJyV2 — Justice Dominguez (@justicedeveraux) April 26, 2021

Within the realm of good faith, the larger conversation around these questions can then expand to contain nuanced considerations of what the consequences of public misbehavior should be, how and when to rehabilitate the reputation of someone who’s been “canceled,” and who gets to decide those things.

Taken in bad faith, however, “cancel culture” becomes an omniscient and dangerous specter: a woke, online social justice mob that’s ready to rise up and attack anyone, even other progressives, at the merest sign of dissent. And it’s this — the fear of a nebulous mob of cancel-happy rabble-rousers — that conservatives have used to their political advantage.

Conservatives are using fear of cancel culture as a cudgel

Critics of cancel culture typically portray whoever is doing the canceling as wielding power against innocent victims of their wrath. From 2015 on, a variety of news outlets, whether through opinion articles or general reporting , have often framed cancel culture as “ mob rule .”

In 2019, the New Republic’s Osita Nwanevu observed just how frequently some media outlets have compared cancel culture to violent political uprisings, ranging from ethnocide to torture under dictatorial regimes. Such an exaggerated framework has allowed conservative media to depict cancel culture as an urgent societal issue. Fox News pundits, for example, have made cancel culture a focal part of their coverage . In one recent survey , people who voted Republican were more than twice as likely to know what “cancel culture” was, compared with Democrats and other voters, even though in the current dominant understanding of cancel culture, Democrats are usually the ones doing the canceling.

“The conceit that the conservative right has gotten so many people to adopt , beyond divorcing the phrase from its origins in Black queer communities, is an obfuscation of the power relations of the stakeholders involved,” journalist Shamira Ibrahim told Vox in an email. “It got transformed into a moral panic akin to being able to irrevocably ruin the powerful with just the press of a keystroke, when it in actuality doesn’t wield nearly as much power as implied by the most elite.”

You wouldn’t know that to listen to right-wing lawmakers and media figures who have latched onto an apocalyptic scenario in which the person or subject who’s being criticized is in danger of being censored, left jobless, or somehow erased from history — usually because of a perceived left-wing mob.

This is a fear that the right has weaponized. At the 2020 Republican National Convention , at least 11 GOP speakers — about a third of those who took the stage during the high-profile event — addressed cancel culture as a concerning political phenomenon. President Donald Trump himself declared that “The goal of cancel culture is to make decent Americans live in fear of being fired, expelled, shamed, humiliated and driven from society as we know it.” One delegate resolution at the RNC specifically targeted cancel culture , describing a trend toward “erasing history, encouraging lawlessness, muting citizens, and violating free exchange of ideas, thoughts, and speech.”

Ibrahim pointed out that in addition to re-waging the war on political correctness that dominated the 1990s by repackaging it as a war on cancel culture, right-wing conservatives have also “attempted to launch the same rhetorical battles” across numerous fronts, attempting to rebrand the same calls for accountability and consequences as “woke brigade, digital lynch mobs, outrage culture and call-out culture.” Indeed, it’s because of the collective organizational power that online spaces provide to marginalized communities, she argued, that anti-cancel culture rhetoric focuses on demonizing them.

Social media is “one of the few spaces that exists for collective feedback and where organizing movements that threaten [conservatives’] social standing have begun,” Ibrahim said, “thus compelling them to invert it into a philosophical argument that doesn’t affect just them, but potentially has destructive effects on censorship for even the working-class individual.”

This potential has nearly become reality through recent forms of Republican-driven legislation around the country. The first wave involved overt censorship , with lawmakers pushing to ban texts like the New York Times’s 1619 Project from educational usage at publicly funded schools and universities. Such censorship could seriously curtail free speech at these institutions — an ironic example of the broader kind of censorship that is seemingly a core fear about cancel culture.

A recent wave of legislation has been directed at corporations as a form of punishment for crossing Republicans. After both Delta Air Lines and Major League Baseball spoke out against Georgia lawmakers’ passage of a restrictive voting rights bill , Republican lawmakers tried to target the companies, tying their public statements to cancel culture. State lawmakers tried and failed to pass a bill stripping Delta of a tax exemption . And some national GOP figures have threatened to punish MLB by removing its exemption from federal antitrust laws. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said that “corporations will invite serious consequences if they become a vehicle for far-left mobs.”

But for all the hysteria and the actual crackdown attempts lawmakers have enacted, even conservatives know that most of the hand-wringing over cancellation is performative. CNN’s AJ Willingham pointed out how easily anti-cancel culture zeal can break down, noting that although the 2021 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) was called “America Uncanceled,” the organization wound up removing a scheduled speaker who had expressed anti-Semitic viewpoints. And Fox News fired a writer last year after he was found to have a history of making racist, homophobic, and sexist comments online.

These moves suggest that though they may decry “woke” hysteria, conservatives also sometimes want consequences for extremism and other harmful behavior — at least when the shaming might fall on them as well.

“This dissonance reveals cancel culture for what it is,” Willingham wrote. “Accountability for one’s actions.”

CPAC’s swift levying of consequences in the case of a potentially anti-Semitic speaker is revealing on a number of levels, not only because it gives away the lie beneath concerns that “cancel culture” is something profoundly new and dangerous, but also because the conference actually had the power to take action and hold the speaker accountable. Typically, the apocryphal “social justice mob” has no such ability. Actually canceling a whole person is much harder to do than opponents of cancel culture might make it sound — nearly impossible, in fact.

Very few “canceled” public figures suffer significant career setbacks

It’s true that some celebrities have effectively been canceled, in the sense that their actions have resulted in major consequences, including job losses and major reputational declines, if not a complete end to their careers.

Consider Harvey Weinstein , Bill Cosby , R. Kelly , and Kevin Spacey , who faced allegations of rape and sexual assault that became impossible to ignore, and who were charged with crimes for their offenses. They have all effectively been “canceled” — Weinstein and Cosby because they’re now convicted criminals, Kelly because he’s in prison awaiting trial , and Spacey because while all charges against him to date have been dropped, he’s too tainted to hire.

Along with Roseanne Barr, who lost her hit TV show after a racist tweet , and Louis C.K., who saw major professional setbacks after he admitted to years of sexual misconduct against female colleagues, their offenses were serious enough to irreparably damage their careers, alongside a push to lessen their cultural influence.

But usually, to effectively cancel a public figure is much more difficult. In typical cases where “cancel culture” is applied to a famous person who does something that incurs criticism, that person rarely faces serious long-term consequences. During the past year alone, a number of individuals and institutions have faced public backlash for troubling behavior or statements — and a number of them thus far have either weathered the storm or else departed their jobs or restructured their operations of their own volition.

For example, beloved talk show host Ellen DeGeneres has come under fire in recent years for a number of reasons, from palling around with George W. Bush to accusing the actress Dakota Johnson of not inviting her to a party to, most seriously, allegedly fostering an abusive and toxic workplace . The toxic workplace allegations had an undeniable impact on DeGeneres’s ratings, with The Ellen DeGeneres Show losing over 40 percent of its viewership in the 2020–’21 TV season. But DeGeneres has not literally been canceled; her daytime talk show has been confirmed for a 19th season, and she continues to host other TV series like HBO Max’s Ellen’s Next Great Designer .

Another TV host recently felt similar heat but has so far retained his job: In February, The Bachelor franchise underwent a reckoning due to a long history of racial insensitivity and lack of diversity, culminating in the announcement that longtime host Chris Harrison would be “ stepping aside for a period of time.” But while Harrison won’t be hosting the upcoming season of The Bachelorette , ABC still lists him as the franchise host, and some franchise alums have come forward to defend him . (It is unclear whether Harrison will return as a host in the future, though he has said he plans to do so and has been working with race educators and engaging in a personal accountability program of “counsel, not cancel.”)

In many cases, instead of costing someone their career, the allegation of having been “canceled” instead bolsters sympathy for the offender, summoning a host of support from both right-wing media and the public. In March 2021, concerns that Dr. Seuss was being “canceled” over a decision by the late author’s publisher to stop printing a small selection of works containing racist imagery led to a run on Seuss’s books that landed him on bestseller lists. And although J.K. Rowling sparked massive outrage and calls to boycott all things Harry Potter after she aired transphobic views in a 2020 manifesto, sales of the Harry Potter books increased tremendously in her home country of Great Britain.

A few months later, 58 British public figures including playwright Tom Stoppard signed an open letter supporting Rowling’s views and calling her the target of “an insidious, authoritarian and misogynistic trend in social media.” And in December, the New York Times not only reviewed the author’s latest title — a new children’s book called The Ickabog — but praised the story’s “moral rectitude,” with critic Sarah Lyall summing up, “It made me weep with joy.” It was an instant bestseller .

In light of these contradictions, it’s tempting to declare that the idea of “canceling” someone has already lost whatever meaning it once had. But for many detractors, the “real” impact of cancel culture isn’t about famous people anyway.

Rather, they worry, “cancel culture” and the polarizing rhetoric it enables really impacts the non-famous members of society who suffer its ostensible effects — and that, even more broadly, it may be threatening our ability to relate to each other at all.

The debate around cancel culture began as a search for accountability. It may ultimately be about encouraging empathy.

It’s not only right-wing conservatives who are wary of cancel culture. In 2019, former President Barack Obama decried cancel culture and “woke” politics, framing the phenomenon as people “be[ing] as judgmental as possible about other people” and adding, “That’s not activism.”

At a recent panel devoted to making a nonpartisan “ Case Against Cancel Culture ,” former ACLU president Nadine Strossen expressed great concern over cancel culture’s chilling effect on the non-famous. “I constantly encounter students who are so fearful of being subjected to the Twitter mob that they are engaging in self-censorship,” she said. Strossen cited as one such chilling effect the isolated instances of students whose college admissions had been rescinded on the basis of racist social media posts.

In his recent book Cancel This Book: The Progressive Case Against Cancel Culture , human rights lawyer and free speech advocate Dan Kovalik argues that cancel culture is basically a giant self-own, a product of progressive semantics that causes the left to cannibalize itself.

“Unfortunately, too many on the left, wielding the cudgel of ‘cancel culture,’ have decided that certain forms of censorship and speech and idea suppression are positive things that will advance social justice,” Kovalik writes . “I fear that those who take this view are in for a rude awakening.”

Kovalik’s worries are partly grounded in a desire to preserve free speech and condemn censorship. But they’re also grounded in empathy. As America’s ideological divide widens, our patience with opposing viewpoints seems to be waning in favor of a type of society-wide “cancel and move on” approach, even though studies suggest that approach does nothing to change hearts and minds. Kovalik points to a survey published in 2020 that found that in 700 interactions, “deep listening” — including “respectful, non-judgmental conversations” — was 102 times more effective than brief interactions in a canvassing campaign for then-presidential candidate Joe Biden.

Across the political spectrum, wariness toward the idea of “cancel culture” has increased — but outside of right-wing political spheres, that wariness isn’t so centered on the hyper-specific threat of losing one’s job or career due to public backlash. Rather, the term “cancel culture” functions as shorthand for an entire mode of polarized, aggressive social engagement.

Journalist (and Vox contributor) Zeeshan Aleem has argued that contemporary social media engenders a mode of communication he calls “disinterpretation,” in which many participants are motivated to join the conversation not because they want to promote communication, or even to engage with the original opinion, but because they seek to intentionally distort the discourse.

In this type of interaction, as Aleem observed in a recent Substack post, “Commentators are constantly being characterized as believing things they don’t believe, and entire intellectual positions are stigmatized based on vague associations with ideas that they don’t have any substantive affiliation with.” The goal of such willful misinterpretation, he argued, is conformity — to be seen as aligned with the “correct” ideological standpoint in a world where stepping out of alignment results in swift backlash, ridicule, and cancellation.

Such an antagonistic approach “effectively treats public debate as a battlefield,” he wrote. He continued:

It’s illustrative of a climate in which nothing is untouched by polarization, in which everything is a proxy for some broader orientation which must be sorted into the bin of good/bad, socially aware/problematic, savvy/out of touch, my team/the enemy. ... We’re tilting toward a universe in which all discourse is subordinate to activism; everything is a narrative, and if you don’t stay on message then you’re contributing to the other team on any given issue. What this does is eliminate the possibility of public ambiguity, ambivalence, idiosyncrasy, self-interrogation.

The problem with this style of communication is that in a world where every argument gets flattened into a binary under which every opinion and every person who publicly shares their thoughts must be either praised or canceled, few people are morally righteous enough to challenge that binary without their own motives and biases then being called into question. The question becomes, as Aleem reframed it for me: “How does someone avoid the reality that their claims of being disinterpreted will be disinterpreted?”

“When people demand good-faith engagement, it can often be dismissed as a distraction tactic or whining about being called out,” he explained, noting that some responses to his original Twitter thread on the subject assumed he must be complaining about just such a callout.

Other complications can arise, such as when the people who are protesting against this type of bad-faith discourse are also criticized for problematic statements or behavior , or perceived as having too much privilege to wholly understand the situation. Remember, the origins of cancel culture are rooted in giving marginalized members of society the ability to seek accountability and change, especially from people who hold a disproportionate amount of wealth, power, and privilege.

“[W]hat people do when they invoke dog whistles like ‘cancel culture’ and ‘culture wars,’” Danielle Butler wrote for the Root in 2018, “is illustrate their discomfort with the kinds of people who now have a voice and their audacity to direct it towards figures with more visibility and power.”

But far too often, people who call for accountability on social media seem to slide quickly into wanting to administer punishment instead. In some cases, this process really does play out with a mob mentality, one that seems bent on inflicting pain and hurt while allowing no room for growth and change, showing no mercy, and offering no real forgiveness — let alone allowing for the possibility that the mob itself might be entirely unjustified.

See, for example, trans writer Isabel Fall, who wrote a short story in 2020 that angered many readers with its depiction of gender dysphoria through the lens of militaristic warfare. (The story has since become a finalist for a Hugo Award.) Because Fall published under a pseudonym, people who disliked the story assumed she must be transphobic rather than a trans woman wrestling with her own dysphoria. Fall was harassed, doxed, forcibly outed, and driven offline . These types of “cancellations” can happen without consideration for the person being canceled, even when that person apologizes — or, as in Fall’s case, even when they had little if anything to be sorry about.

The conflation of antagonized social media debates with the more serious aims to make powerful people face consequences is part of the problem. “I think the messy and turbulent evolution of speech norms online influences people’s perception of what’s called cancel culture,” Aleem said. He added that he’s grown “resistant to using the term [cancel culture] because it’s become so hard to pin down.”

“People connect boycotts with de-platforming speakers on college campuses,” he observed, “with social media harassment, with people being fired abruptly for breaching a taboo in a viral video.” The result is an environment where social media is a double-edged sword: “One could argue,” Aleem said, “that there’s now public input on issues [that wasn’t available] before, and that’s good for civil society, but that the vehicle through which that input comes produces some civically unhealthy ways of expression.”

Prevailing confusion about cancel culture hasn’t stopped it from becoming culturally and politically entrenched

If the conversation around cancel culture is unhealthy, then one can argue that the social systems cancel culture is trying to target are even more unhealthy — and that, for many people, is the bottom line.

The concept of canceling someone was created by communities of people who’ve never had much power to begin with. When people in those communities attempt to demand accountability by canceling someone, the odds are still stacked against them. They’re still the ones without the social, political, or professional power to compel someone into meaningful atonement, but they can at least be vocal by calling for a collective boycott.

The push by right-wing lawmakers and pundits to use the concept as a tool to vilify the left, liberals, and the powerless upends the original logic of cancel culture, Ibrahim told me. “It is being used to obscure marginalized voices by inverting the victim and the offender, and disingenuously affording disproportionate impact to the reach of a single voice — which has historically long been silenced — to now being the silencer of cis, male, and wealthy individuals,” she said.

And that approach is both expanding and growing more visible. What’s more, it is a divide not just between ideologies, but also between tactical approaches in navigating those ideological differences and dealing with wrongdoing.

“It effectuates a slippery-slope argument by taking a rhetorical scenario and pushing it to really absurdist levels, and furthermore asking people to suspend their implicit understanding of social constructs of power and class,” Ibrahim said. “It mutates into, ‘If I get canceled, then anyone can get canceled.’” She pointed out that usually, the supposedly “canceled” individual suffers no real long-term harm — “particularly when you give additional time for a person to regroup from a scandal. The media cycle iterates quicker than ever in present day.”

She suggested that perhaps the best approach to combating the escalation of cancel culture hysteria into a political weapon is to refuse to let those with power shape the way the conversation plays out.

“I think our remit, if anything, is to challenge that reframing and ask people to define the stakes of what material quality of life and liberty was actually lost,” she said.

In other words, the way cancel culture is discussed in the media might make it seem like something to fear and avoid at all costs, an apocalyptic event that will destroy countless lives and livelihoods, but in most cases, it’s probably not. That’s not to suggest that no one will ever be held accountable, or that powerful people won’t continue to be asked to answer for their transgressions. But the greater worry is still that people with too much power might use it for bad ends.

At its best, cancel culture has been about rectifying power imbalances and redistributing power to those who have little of it. Instead, it now seems that the concept may have become a weapon for people in power to use against those it was intended to help.

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Friday essay: Joanna Bourke, the NSW arts minister, and the unruly contradictions of cancel culture

Associate professor, University of New England

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Jennifer Ann McDonell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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An earworm has gnawed its way into my brain, looping the same melody over and over. It is Italy’s most famous resistance song, Bella Ciao , which I recently heard played as a high-decibel dance remix in an exclusive Balinese bar overlooking the Indian Ocean. Well-heeled patrons of diverse nationalities bopped to the catchy tune in the glow of a glorious sunset and, fuelled by exotic cocktails, chanted the chorus. I wondered how a sacred anthem of radical credentials could have strayed so far from its original meanings and contexts.

Bella Ciao began as a partisan anthem, possibly with roots in folk laments sung by exploited workers in the north of Italy. It is associated in Italian minds with the resistance of 1943–45.

The song’s popularity peaked when it was used as a soundtrack for the popular Netflix series Money Heist (2017). It was sung from balconies in Europe during the pandemic; it is de rigueur at political rallies by groups of all political leanings. It is used to sell burgers in Korea and to celebrate quashing an opponent in football matches (“Messi Ciao”). Unanchored from its local habitation as a protest folk song, Bella Ciao is now a tune that can travel anywhere and represent everyone and everything.

The less benign phrase “cancel culture” (and its cognate “cancelling”), which has roots in oral Black vernacular traditions, has suffered a similar semantic drift.

“Cancelling” originally referred to a practice among the disempowered of “calling out” socially unacceptable behaviour and discrimination. It has now become a catch-all phrase, imprecisely applied to all manner of people, places and things. It is used to signify everything from vigilante justice, hostile debate, intimidation and harassment, to levelling statues and de-platforming books and lectures in universities and school syllabi.

Cancel culture is often conflated with adjacent phenomena such as outrage culture, boycotts and backlashes. It is linked to debates about censorship, free speech, decolonising the curriculum, “wokeness” and “political correctness”. The noisy doxxing and bad faith piling-on feels, to many, like a rudderless surrogate of the judicial process, at once chaotic and ritualised, and has invited comparisons by some commentators to ancient, ritualised practices of scapegoating.

A real phenomenon

While cancel culture may be a hot topic among journalistic and intellectual elites, a recent UK YouGov survey found that only around a third of Britons (35%) think they know what “cancel culture” means. Of the two-thirds who don’t know what it means, close to four in ten claimed never to have heard the expression in the first place (38%).

That many people have not heard of “cancel culture” doesn’t mean the phenomenon isn’t real. On August 19, the NSW Minister for the Arts, Ben Franklin, demanded that Sydney’s Festival of Dangerous Ideas cancel a talk about bestiality by eminent historian Joanna Bourke. After being contacted for comment by 2GB talkback radio host Ben Fordham, Franklin’s office said he was

deeply concerned by the contents of Bourke’s scheduled talk entitled “The Last Taboo”, and is demanding festival organisers remove it from their program.

Festival curator and Ethics Centre director Simon Longstaff refused to comply with the request, stating Bourke’s views have been misunderstood. “If somebody was to provide a history of cannibalism or slavery,” said Longstaff , “does that mean they are therefore encouraging us to eat each other or enslave our fellow man?” As a result of this media attention, he added, Bourke has been “trolled by lowlifes”.

In 2019, the Macquarie Dictionary committee named “cancel culture” Word of the Year , noting it captured an important aspect of the zeitgeist. According to its definition, it describes community attitudes that

call for or bring about the withdrawal of support from [for] a public figure, such as cancellation of an acting role, a ban on playing an artist’s music, removal from social media, etc., usually in response to an accusation of a socially unacceptable action or comment.

Franklin’s attempt to cancel Bourke falls squarely within this circumscribed definition.

Read more: Cancel culture, cleanskin, hedonometer ... I'm not sure I like any of Macquarie Dictionary's words of the year

The strikethrough option

Is this attempt to “cancel” Bourke simply another example of the anti-intellectualism evident across the political spectrum? Is vitriolic misinterpretation really replacing thoughtful debate?

Attempts at “cancelling” often aim to inflict maximum reputational or economic damage to otherwise out-of-reach public figures and celebrities. But as the case of author J.K. Rowling suggests, the more famous you are, the more difficult you are to topple. Rowling appears to have suffered no significant career setbacks following calls for her cancellation after she tweeted controversial views on gender identity and biological sex.

Cancelling, in this sense, is a bit like executing the strikethrough option in the keyboard: a function that enables you to draw a line through a word while allowing it to remain legible and in place.

Cancel culture is not always discerning in its targets. The transnational #MeToo movement, to cite one example, has contributed to the exposure of high-profile sexual predators such as Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein, leading to criminal convictions. But other cancellations enact a more casual cruelty on ordinary, innocent people. I am reminded of the US writer Shirley Jackson’s story The Lottery (1948), in which a member of a small American community is selected by chance and stoned.

Origins in social justice

The idea of cancelling or calling out transgressions has its origins in the creative spaces occupied by marginalised groups. Exemplified by hashtag-oriented social justice movements such as #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo, the strategy has been successfully deployed by activists to call out real harms and demand accountability.

Journalist Aja Romano notes the idea of cancelling a person, place or thing has long circulated within Black culture, and traces it to Nile Rodgers’s 1981 single “Your Love Is Cancelled”.

Writer and researcher Meredith D. Clark argues that “calling out”, which begat cancelling, is “an indigenous expressive form” of “useful anger” perfected by Black women. The practice was colourfully deployed to name individual transgressions. In its networked forms, it became a critique of systemic inequality.

It developed into a socially mediated phenomenon with origins in queer communities of colour. In the early 2010s, Black Twitter – a meta-network of culturally connected communities – made the language of being “cancelled” into an internet meme.

The term “cancel culture”, however, has become unmoored from its history and its original significations. In its clamorous current form, it has no coherent ideology: cancellations come just as steadily from the right as the left. Reframed by the dominant culture, and amplified by the media, it has come to be used as a term of approbation wielded against minorities to maintain the status quo.

In the attention economy of the 24-hour news cycle, journalists routinely extract and decontextualise rich traditions of collective resistance (or in Bourke’s case, scholarly research) to meet the demand for attention-grabbing content. In doing so, they often fail to explain why these debates should or shouldn’t be part of mainstream public discourse.

Franklin is on record as championing freedom of expression and diversity of opinion. Earlier this year, he stated an artist’s boycott of the Sydney Festival was “censorship” and that it risked silencing diverse voices and important perspectives to the “great detriment” of society.

Given free speech is a sovereign human right many liberals and conservatives claim to hold dear, attempting to cancel a reputable academic seems an awkward spot to be occupying. Bourke is a prizewinning author of 14 books and a Fellow of the British Academy. She is an expert on the history of violence in British, Irish, US and Australian societies. Her work includes histories of rape, fear and killing. Her most recent book, Loving Animals: On Bestiality, Zoophilia and Post-Human Love (2020), has been widely reviewed in scholarly journals.

Read more: Was the Sydney Festival boycott justifiable to support Palestine?

Mediated speech

How is it that the most ardent defenders of free speech and diversity are often the same people who seek to silence those with whom they do not happen to agree, without a sound knowledge of the ideas on which they are passing judgement?

Let’s be clear. Platitudes about freedom of expression, in the contexts we are discussing, are not about the abstract principle of free speech as such. They are about the greyer areas of where we draw the boundaries. What kind of discourse and actions are considered acceptable? Which are morally out of bounds? And, crucially, who gets to decide?

All societies place some limits on the exercise of speech, because it always takes place in a context of competing values. And in the case of cancel culture, this exercise of free speech is mediated by commercially owned social media platforms such as Twitter – the main arena of cancel culture – which, while free, thrives on the scandal that generates profit.

In this respect, it is useful to remember that the kinds of speech and actions that society deems acceptable are historically contingent and an effect of power relations.

Societies evolve; norms change; attitudes progress; the boundaries of moral acceptability are redrawn over time. It is also in the nature of linguistic meaning to be fluid and provisional, not fixed or rigid. As Judith Butler explains in Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (1996), speech acts are constrained by a larger set of discursive rules. Those rules are negotiable. In this sense there is, strictly speaking, no such thing as free speech, in the sense of unlimited and decontextualised speech.

An idea deeply embedded in liberal democracies is that people are equally empowered to engage in debate and freely express their ideas. But is this really so? The public sphere is a fractured space of competing elites. Idealistic visions of equal access fail to acknowledge disparities of knowledge and resources between social elites and disempowered groups.

Right-wing politicians and commentators have claimed in recent years that a progressive cancel culture has silenced alternative perspectives and stifled robust intellectual debate. The pejorative label “cancel culture” has been misappropriated to discredit social justice movements like #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo.

The question that remains to be answered is why, even as pundits condemn cancel culture as the mob running amok, the injustices and systemic inequalities that cancelling strategies evolved to name remain largely in place. The example of Franklin and Bourke suggests hypocritical censoriousness remains part of the dominant political culture.

Understanding the genealogy of “cancel culture”, and how its language has been reframed and mobilised, may help us see such moral condemnations for what they really are: a reactive rearguard reflex by those in power, who are no longer congruent with the progressive liberal culture that dominates a fractured public sphere.

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How Do You Feel About Cancel Culture?

Do you think public call-outs are an effective way to hold others accountable for their harmful actions? Or is it better to call them in and work toward a resolution?

By Nicole Daniels

Students in U.S. high schools can get free digital access to The New York Times until Sept. 1, 2021.

When you hear the terms “canceled” or “cancel culture,” what comes to mind?

According to Dictionary.com, “ cancel culture refers to the popular practice of withdrawing support for ( canceling ) public figures and companies after they have done or said something considered objectionable or offensive.”

But these days, the phenomenon can apply to personal relationships, too. Have you had an experience with canceling someone — whether a friend or family member, a celebrity, or someone in your school community — or being canceled yourself? Would you say that cancel culture is prevalent at your school?

In the 2019 Style article “ Tales From the Teenage Cancel Culture ,” Sanam Yar and Jonah Engel Bromwich share six stories of cancel culture from high school and college students.

In one, a teenager grapples with what she sees as a classmate’s problematic music choices:

A few weeks ago, Neelam, a high school senior, was sitting in class at her Catholic school in Chicago. After her teacher left the room, a classmate began playing “Bump N’ Grind,” an R. Kelly song. Neelam, 17, had recently watched the documentary series “Surviving R. Kelly” with her mother. She said it had been “emotional to take in as a black woman.” Neelam asked the boy and his cluster of friends to stop playing the track, but he shrugged off the request. “‘It’s just a song,’” she said he replied. “‘We understand he’s in jail and known for being a pedophile, but I still like his music.’” She was appalled. They were in a class about social justice. They had spent the afternoon talking about Catholicism, the common good and morality. The song continued to play. That classmate, who is white, had done things in the past that Neelam described as problematic, like casually using racist slurs — not name-calling — among friends. After class, she decided he was “canceled,” at least to her. Her decision didn’t stay private; she told a friend that week that she had canceled him. She told her mother too. She said that this meant she would avoid speaking or engaging with him in the future, that she didn’t care to hear what he had to say, because he wouldn’t change his mind and was beyond reason. “When it comes to cancel culture , it’s a way to take away someone’s power and call out the individual for being problematic in a situation,” Neelam said. “I don’t think it’s being sensitive. I think it’s just having a sense of being observant and aware of what’s going on around you.”

In another, a young person describes her own experience of being “canceled”:

It took some time for L to understand that she had been canceled. She was 15 and had just returned to a school she used to attend. “All the friends I had previously had through middle school completely cut me off,” she said. “Ignored me, blocked me on everything, would not look at me.” Months went by. Toward the end of sophomore year, she reached out over Instagram to a former friend, asking why people were not talking to her. It was lunchtime; the person she asked was sitting in the cafeteria with lots of people and so they all piled on. It was like an avalanche, L said. Within a few minutes she got a torrent of direct messages from the former friend on Instagram, relaying what they had said. One said she was a mooch. One said she was annoying and petty. One person said that she had ruined her self-esteem. Another said that L was an emotional leech who was thirsty for validation. “This put me in a situation where I thought I had done all these things,” L said. “I was bad. I deserved what was happening.” Two years have passed since then. “You can do something stupid when you’re 15, say one thing and 10 years later that shapes how people perceive you,” she said. “We all do cringey things and make dumb mistakes and whatever. But social media’s existence has brought that into a place where people can take something you did back then and make it who you are now.” In her junior year, L said, things got better. Still, that rush of messages and that social isolation have left a lasting impact. “I’m very prone to questioning everything I do,” she said. “‘Is this annoying someone?’ ‘Is this upsetting someone?’” “I have issues with trusting perfectly normal things,” she said. “That sense of me being some sort of monster, terrible person, burden to everyone, has stayed with me to some extent. There’s still this sort of lingering sense of: What if I am?”

Students, read the entire article , then tell us:

Which of the stories in this article resonated with or stood out to you most? Why? Do you have any examples like these from your own school?

Have you ever “canceled” a classmate? Family member? Friend? Celebrity? What led you to that decision? Looking back, do you think it was the right choice? Why or why not?

Have you ever been canceled? Or have people ever been upset or offended by something you said or did? How did it feel? How did you react? Did you take responsibility and apologize? Did you ask for more information? Or did you feel you were wrongly accused of something?

What do you think about being “called out” versus being “called in” as a way to address problematic or harmful actions? (As the article defines it, “‘Called in’ means to be gently led to understand your error; call-outs are more aggressive.”) Have you ever witnessed one or both of these approaches? Do you think one is more effective than the other? Should different responses be used for different situations — for example, for a celebrity versus a family member? Why?

What do you think is the best response to being called out? Should the person take responsibility? If so, what should that look and sound like? Should they apologize publicly or privately? Or should they just step back from the person or community that was harmed?

What is your opinion of cancel culture as a whole? In a 2019 interview , Barack Obama challenged youth activists on their “purity” and “judgmentalism,” saying, “That’s not activism.” But in an Opinion essay , Ernest Owens, a journalist, wrote that Mr. Obama’s comments reflected a very “boomer view of cancel culture,” one in which older and more powerful people seem to be “more upset by online criticism than they are by injustice.” What do you think? Has cancel culture gone too far and become unproductive? Or is it a necessary and effective response to perceived wrongdoing?

About Student Opinion

• Find all our Student Opinion questions in this column . • Have an idea for a Student Opinion question? Tell us about it . • Learn more about how to use our free daily writing prompts for remote learning .

Students 13 and older in the United States and the United Kingdom, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.

Nicole Daniels joined The Learning Network as a staff editor in 2019 after working in museum education, curriculum writing and bilingual education. More about Nicole Daniels

Chapter 4: Convincing Discourses

4.3.2 #canceled (research essay)

Melanie Wroblewski

English 102, April 2021

With the pandemic we can look back on a year of things cancelled. Holidays were cancelled. Sporting events were cancelled. Concerts were cancelled. While 2020 was the big year of all good things cancelled many would say that the year itself should be cancelled. Certainly, the main   reasons   the year was hated was that most work and schools went online with   Zoom   and it was hard to get a roll of toilet paper. Would I go as far to say 2020 was a god-awful year? Of course, I worked in a grocery store and people were insane. Would I say it needs to be cancelled? Well, no because that   doesn’t   really apply in this setting. We had a lot of canceled events but to cancel the year is hard because in principle cancelling   doesn’t   work that way. Why   doesn’t   cancelling apply in this setting? Well, what is cancelling to begin with?   Is cancel culture beneficial in society? Can someone truly be cancelled, who does cancel culture   hurt? Is cancel culture   hurting   more than helping? When has cancel culture gone too far? How do people interact with the idea of cancel culture on social media? What happens in   a fandom   when someone is cancelled or actively being cancelled? Do fans go too far? Has there been a time when   a fandom   has gone too far? Is there still room to enjoy what is created by a cancelled entertainer?  Cancel culture may be a good form of social justice in society but the ways in which it is used and abused online has   swayed   far from its actual purpose.   

The conveniences that the internet and social media has brought have certainly outnumbered the bad. Today   social media   can branch together family who   have not   seen each other in days, months, or years and now especially due to the pandemic. There is however a downside to platforms like this. These platforms undoubtedly can bring the worst out of people hopping on a   trend or hashtag. When someone makes even the slightest misstep people   act   online to let everyone know. This has brought about a new era to social media with rising concepts of cancel or call out culture. But what is cancel culture?   One explanation form “Disruptive rhetoric in an age of outrage” by Michael Welsh explains that cancel culture has become its own societal discourse of social   issues in   which people can take to social media and announce that someone is cancelled for a perceived crime by the accuser.   

With cancel culture social media has become reactionary instead of investigating whether these claims are true.   In “With (Stan) ding Cancel Culture: Stan Twitter and Reactionary Fandoms” Hailey   Roos   explains that   “cancel culture is intended to hold powerful people accountable, but it has been constantly appropriated, and its influence has been diminished because of how frequently people are cancelled for less serious offenses.”   What ways can someone be cancelled? There can be social media movements led by hashtags declaring   someone   is cancelled which can lead to extreme consequences   to   those, the people cancelling and those being cancelled. The action taken by those who are cancelled can be to take accountability in their actions and reflect on them and change or they can   defend and   deflect what is being accused of them to   keep   the status they have.   Joseph Ching Velasco in “You are Cancelled: Virtual Collective Consciousness and the Emergence of Cancel Culture as Ideological Purging” explains that there can be those who are accused of committing a crime they   did not   commit for the sake of someone else’s gain. In the same sense though cancel culture as an act in society is confusing as it can be used for its purpose or as a “power play” which leads to a need for more understanding on how to wield such a power. There   is not   a clear-cut way of knowing for certain if   in   the moment it is merely just a business move or if the person did something wrong.   

Today   the internet, more specifically social media platforms, have decided that there is a need for judge, jury, and executioner in the matter of social issues. Who   oversees   making such decisions and on what terms are used to judge?   From “Twitter, What’s The Verdict?” Aya Imam explains that it can be said that growing up we are taught through fairytales and fables that everything is good versus evil, where we take every situation and boil it down to that. In terms of defining every situation in terms of black and white that leaves little room   for the person to defend themselves.   If someone is   justifiably   cancelled what are these codes of conduct that they have broken?   Then it seems for that everyday people have taken matters into their own hands by essentially “cancelling” someone if they   don’t   follow societal rules (Imam 2).   

When it comes to hearing about cancel culture the first people to come to mind would be celebrities. Celebrities fill our newsfeed on the daily with videos, stories, etc. for the public’s entertainment. There has become a sense of connection with celebrities   and their audience, where they need to adhere to their publicized person or face the consequences (Roos   3-4). With this constant connection more issues   become known   or are dug up. In recent   years,   the celebrities   that people associate with cancel culture are   names like Harvey Weinstein and Billy Cosby, who both have a list of sexual assault allegations against them. Others like Kathy Griffin, who posted a photo of herself holding a “bloody” Trump mask, or Taylor Swift who will be discussed later in this essay.  

Aya Imam briefly discusses the disparities in cancel culture:  

Does Harvey Weinstein deserve the backlash he’s received? Yes, 1000% yes. But does James Charles – a very famous YouTuber who was initially called out by another YouTuber for endorsing the ‘wrong’ vitamin brand – deserve the false accusations of being a sexual predator (which, in turn, resulted in millions of people unfollowing and unsubscribing from him)? No, I don’t believe he deserves that (Imam 2).  

I would like to note that as I was doing my research, I picked this article and this quote because it did display the gap between how serious or not Weinstein’s or Charles’s situations were but at the current time it has   become known   that James Charles has multiple allegations of sexual misconduct (texting/messaging primarily) with minors. With the James Charles cancellation he   was friends with another YouTuber, Tati   Westbrook,   and owner of a vitamin supplement company, who recorded a video   accusing of   Charles of behaving inappropriately with straight men. The video and its message were then condensed down to it being about Charles endorsing a rival vitamin company.   In   “How Can We End #CancelCulture – Tort Liability or Thumper’s Rule?”   Nanci   Carr   explains how a situation much like James Charles’s can show that   when a celebrity is cancelled it is more off a hunch than actual   information.   So, then what   decides   why, how, or what extent someone is cancelled? There is no real set of rules on cancelling someone.   Carr   explains that   “we are living in a ‘cancel culture’ where if someone, often a celebrity, does something either illegal or unethical, society is quick to ‘cancel’ them, or lessen their celebrity standing or cultural capital   (133).” For Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein, yes, they face consequences for their actions but when it comes to Taylor Swift was the punishment fitting of the crime?  

As I had said previously mentioned Taylor Swift for   a moment   had been cancelled. Most if not all articles on the topic of cancel culture touched on what happened to Taylor Swift. Truly, I   do not   think anyone would consider her to be cancelled because she faced no major backlash financially but what   the situation   did damage was her reputation, which would become the topic of her 6 th   album.   Swift’s story goes all the way back to 2009 when Swift won an award and Kanye West stormed the stage to let her and everyone know that Beyonce had the best video of the year. Swift and West had different paths from this event with Swift being pegged as a victim and West as the villain, which led to if other situations arose that Swift was playing the victim because that first moment garnered her so much sympathy and people saying that it helped her career back then. Fast forward to 2016 after West and Swift had mended fences as Swift puts it in “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things” and West had called to ask if he could reference Swift in a song. The song in question was “famous” would later be released for everyone to hear the line, “I   feel like me and Taylor might still have sex, why, I made that bitch famous.” Swift claimed she had only heard   the first part of the lyric and was never made aware of the part where West would call her a bitch or that he made her famous. This led to bitterness on social media between Kanye West, his wife Kim Kardashian, and   the   Kardashian’s friends and family.   

The following quote by Swift was at the 2016 Grammy Awards after winning album of the year and many believe it is in reference to the situation:  

As the first woman to win Album of the Year at the Grammys twice, I want to say to all the young women out there, there are going to be people along the way who will try to undercut your success or take credit for your accomplishments or your fame, but, if you just focus on the work and you don’t let those people sidetrack you, someday when you get where you’re going you’ll look around and you will know that it was you and the people who love you who put you there. And that will be the greatest feeling in the world. Thank you for this moment. (Griffiths)  

Taylor Swift in this moment wanted to show that she got to where she was on her own and for   the   Kardashian this moment would lead to her releasing clips of the recorded conversation. While the phone conversation was recorded what we saw in 2016 was an edited version posted on Snapchat by Kim Kardashian, years later the full conversation would be released online to reveal more truth to Swift’s side of the story. The below picture is a tweet that Kardashian tweeted before the release of Kardashian’s video, she posted on Twitter “Wait it’s legit National Snake Day?!?!?They have holidays for everybody, I mean everything these days!” with a slew of snake emojis. As shown in the picture it was liked   over 300 thousand times and shared over 200 thousand times.   

You can see the Tweet here 

Kardashian’s tweet   doesn’t   seem   too   malicious at face value. The tweet   doesn’t   mention anyone by name,   doesn’t   mention the need to cancel anyone, nor does it attack   anyone. Kardashian’s plan was methodical, by simultaneously posting this tweet and posting the edited video it jumpstarted others to take the idea that Taylor Swift was a snake   and not to be trusted. There was an onslaught of attacks on Swift and her character. The hashtag #TaylorSwiftisoverparty was a worldwide trend.   In the article “From Cancel Culture to Changing Culture” Liz Theriault explained that   “[Swift] was being sent ‘mass amounts of messages’ telling her to ‘either shut up, disappear, or [as] it could also be perceived as, kill yourself.’” The extent of tweets towards Swift ranged from benign to telling her to kill herself or for her to be killed. In terms of cancellation, yes Taylor Swift was indeed cancelled but online forums made her the target of worse hate. Cancel culture should not be to take the opportunity to break down someone even more than needed, in this situation it   should have   been to take accountability of your actions however benign they may have been. For cancel culture this is one of many examples of how we make quick calls about someone’s character due to social media outlets (Imam 3). In the below tweet the user says, “I love this #taylorswiftisoverparty…. been at this party since 1989…. most annoying and ridiculous singer in the   biz…. ok! Kill her!” This shows the extreme hate that was directed at Swift during the cancellation.   With respect to the following person, I have blacked out their image and username.  

After seeing such malice towards a celebrity for a crime   committed   how can being cancelled affect them? As with Swift she disappeared for a year, no trace of her in public or on social media where she was an avid user prior to this scandal because   that is   what she thought people wanted. Even with years prior of being primarily silent on political issues, she knew the optics of getting involved in the 2016 presidential election.  

Taylor Swift in the following explains why she felt adding her opinion in such a polarizing election year would have added fuel to the fire:  

The summer before that election, all people were saying was ‘She’s calculated. She’s manipulative. She’s not what she seems. She’s a snake. She’s a liar.’ These are the same exact insults people were hurling at Hillary. ‘Would I be an endorsement, or would I be a liability? Literally millions of people were telling me to disappear. So, I disappeared. In many senses (BBC News).  

With the rise of social media platforms there has become a sense of connection with celebrity and their audience, where they need to adhere to their publicized persona or face the consequences (Roos   3-4). As with the case of a cancelled celebrity what happens to their respective fandom? I can say that I do have a bias in this situation because I am a Taylor Swift fan, while I am still on the fence of the idea of being called a “Swiftie,”   a hardcore stan, I can say seeing this used against a celebrity that I liked can also put a form of shame on a fan. Should I   still like her? If I still like her what will people think of me? Did she really lie about the situation? If she lied, then is it true she just plays the victim any time she gets called out? All valid questions I had for myself which now looking back on were a little over the top, if she had done what she was accused of it really   was not   that bad of a crime. During that time when it came to Taylor Swift most of my friends just labelled her as annoying, not a good singer, and that she deserved it. After watching several other celebrities or content creators being cancelled or held accountable, I can say that sometimes it is hard to say that I am a fan without there being some amount of judgment.   

We   have really seen cancel culture only affect those who have fame and money but cancel culture is not a solo phenomenon to affect only celebrities, it also affects everyday people like me and you. With call out culture it is   seen   with bringing awareness to social issues.   Unfortunately,   you will see more videos of people acting out on racist ideas. The purpose of call out culture is in its name; you call out that behavior.   In the essay “Cancel Culture: Posthuman   Hauntologies   in Digital Rhetoric and the Latent Values of Virtual Community Networks” Austin Hooks discusses the possibility there is   with   cancel culture,   social media, and how it   can   drudge   up the past holding people accountable to their past actions, which can be referred to as a “haunting” or doxing and is the basis of this culture. While most people think   it is   fun to revisit posts from their pasts on apps like   Timehop   and Facebook, others suffer this as an unfortunate consequence as their past self comes back to haunt them.   

For an example of a haunting I would like you to meet Carson King. King was a regular college student who   needed   beer money and made a sign that said to Venmo him Busch Light Beer money, this led to many donating a large amount of money to the beer cause which he in turn donated to charities and would later team up with the same beer company to donate upwards of one million dollars to a charity of his choice (Carr   135-136). The story at the time was a feel-good moment where you could see a kind college kid doing something for laughs would end up turning his life upside down. King was eventually cancelled for two old racists tweets that were dug up by a reporter, Aaron Calvin, while writing a feel-good piece on the donations (Carr   136). Was it necessary for Calvin to report this while   writing   an article on a large donation? No, it really   was not   necessary but Calvin “felt obligated to publicize the existence, confirming once again, no good deed goes unpunished (Carr   137).” The story on his tweets turned into companies backing out   of partnerships with   King   and   getting negative attention online. King apologized for his past remarks but also felt that they   did not   represent   who he was as person at the time. After King’s apology,   he was still receiving criticism for his past remarks, many online had thought it was unnecessary for Calvin to go through King’s social media the story was on how King was able to get money to donate to charity and not for King’s past. The public then   acted   and as with Calvin, they felt obligated to   investigate   Calvin’s old tweets and found some highly questionable tweets (Carr   138). For King, it was unnecessary to do   a deep dive into his past actions online so was it necessary to do the same to Calvin?   “[Calvin] acknowledged that [the tweets] were ‘frankly embarrassing’ but then asserted that they had been ‘taken out of context’ to ‘wield   disingenuous   arguments against [him]’ (Carr   138)” Calvin had lost his job and suffered similar consequences for the same judgment he had placed on   King.   

On the other hand, with the case of Bill Cosby some repercussions with “the way the public villainized Cosby’s family, and even the fans of the show, mirrors the ways that incarcerated citizens are being reduced to their ‘guilty’ label and vilified, as described by Jamison (Imam 3).” When a celebrity is cancelled it goes so far to say that if you partake in their media, you are also just as bad. As I have said   there   was a mild villainization on being a part of a fandom where their celebrity is being cancelled but of nothing criminal. In the case of Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, R. Kelly, among others who have a list of sexual assault allegations against them, can you still enjoy their art?   Yes, you can still enjoy their art but also remember what they did. You   do not   have to take accountability for their actions but also   do not   vilify   their victims.   

We have looked at cancel culture in terms of celebrity, regular people, and the reaction to their said cancellation. Briefly mentioned is cancel culture in terms of fans but what contribution do fans have on social media especially   on   cancel culture? “Fandoms often serve as a buffer to being cancelled on Twitter (Roos   4).” Many fans especially the hardcore fans, also known as stans or depending on who it is for have a special name like   Swifties, can help soften the blow that the celebrity is experiencing. For   Taylor Swift,   her fans were online trying to defend her but would mostly go on to send a brief tweet to show their support or love. Recently   this has become more of a popular thing for her fans during a time where she was battling for the rights to the   masters   to her first six albums.   In the article “Taylor Swift needs to call off her fans as they send Scooter Braun death threats”   Mel   Evans discusses how   in 2019 it was announced that the record label that owned Swift’s   masters   was being   sold to   Scooter Braun.  

In the following quote from a   Tumblr   post of Swift’s she explains everything surrounding the battle to owning her   masters:  

For years I asked, pleaded for a chance to own my work. Instead, I was given an opportunity to sign back up to Big Machine Records and “earn’ one album back at a time, one for every new one I turned in. … I learned about Scooter Braun’s purchase of my masters as it was announced to the world. All I could think about was the incessant, manipulative bullying I’ve received at his hands for years. (Taylor Swift)  

Swift also said “Please let Scott Borchetta and Scooter Braun know how you feel about this. Scooter also manages several artists who I really believe care about other artists and their work.”  This message would lead her fans known as  Swifties  to go on the attack.

Swifties  would go on Scooter Braun’s social media and either just tell him to give her the  masters  back or actively threaten him, his family, and company. Braun would ask Swift to talk about this privately instead of broadcasting it to her many fans (Evans). This  was not  the only example of  Swifties  going past the message she was trying to send to her fans. More recently a tv show on Netflix titled “Ginny  & Georgia” and one of its lead  actors  was on the receiving end of this. You can see the Tweet here. 

The following is a quote from the image above of a tweet from Taylor Swift:  

Hey Ginny & Georgia, 2010 called and wants it lazy, deeply sexist joke back. How about we stop degrading hard   working women   by defining this horse shit as   Funny. Also, @netflix after Miss Americana this outfit   doesn’t   look cute on you Happy Women’s History Month I guess (Taylor Swift).  

The image that Swift had post was of the line from the show which says, “What do you care? You go through men faster than Taylor Swift.” Swift had been the punchline of this joke for many years having called it out in the past and even writing songs about how the media portrays   her like “Blank Space” and “Look What You Made Me Do.”   Swifties   took this tweet as a call to action to attack the show, but not the writers of the joke, the   actor   who spoke the line. A lot of responses were   like   “Respect Taylor Swift” or “Apologize to Taylor” but then there were quite a few racist replies which many wanted Taylor Swift herself to apologize for.   Swifties   as a culture I   would not   say they are racist, but when people start swinging for their favorite they tend to punch down and unfortunately aim to hurt. The   actor   was not the target of Swift’s disdain, it was the show writers and Netflix but because she used the online platform to air her grievance her fans wanted to take their turn at cancelling someone. Unfortunately for Swift, her fans will   continue   this path of destruction for the sake of preserving her legacy.   Fans have the power to build up   and   tear down.   

I have talked about different variations of cancelling, the reactions the public and fandoms have made,   and   the   vague rules that are broken but what are these rules to online social platforms?   Who makes these rules? If you break these   rules,   are you thereby cancelled?   Throughout all social media online we have a collected idea of   what is   right and wrong and that is referred to as “collective consciousness” (Velasco 2).   As a society, we have applied some baseline rules to ourselves of what is acceptable and what is not. When people break these   rules,   they have committed a high crime   where people see no difference between people convicted of crimes and people who are cancelled (Imam 3).   When there is no difference between those incarcerated and those cancelled   the   rules need to be revisited and revised much like the justice system altogether.   With this cancel culture can be beneficial in society after it is closely reexamined   so it is not used as a power gain or to tear down someone for simply not agreeing to something. People should be held accountable for serious indiscretions   like derogatory remarks, violence, and sexual assault. Cancel culture should not be used as a witch hunt for the rich and famous to root out people who are their rivals. With the current political climate and with current news media we need to stop labeling everything as being cancelled when it truly is not. Mr. Potato Head is not being cancelled for the company declaring it is genderless,   it is   a potato of course it has no gender. Dr. Seuss made highly racist books that the estate wants to withdraw from the public because of their content, not because they are being cancelled. Instead of cancel culture it needs a stiff remarketing as accountability   culture.   As   a society we need to cancel “cancel culture” and instead help people become accountable of their actions.   

@kimkardashian. “Wait it’s legit National Snake Day?!?!?They have holidays for everybody, I mean everything these days!” Twitter, 16 July 2016 7:22 P.M. https://twitter.com/KimKardashian/status/754818471465287680

BBC News. “Taylor Swift: ‘Saying You’re Cancelled Is like Saying Kill Yourself.’” BBC News, 9 Aug. 2019, www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-49289430.

Carr, Nanci K. “How Can We End# CancelCulture-Tort Liability or Thumper’s Rule?.” Cath. UJL & Tech 28 (2019): 133.

Evans, M. (2019, November 26). Taylor Swift needs to call off her fans as they SEND Scooter Braun death threats. Retrieved March 16, 2021, from https://metro.co.uk/2019/11/25/taylor-swift-attack-scooter-braun-danger-toxic-fandom-11215672/

Griffiths, K. (2016, February 16). Transcript of Taylor SWIFT’S 2016 Grammys speech that was a HUGE Feminist Victory. Retrieved April 16, 2021, from https://www.bustle.com/articles/142222-transcript-of-taylor-swifts-2016-grammys-speech-that-was-a-huge-feminist-victory

Hooks, Austin. “Cancel culture: posthuman hauntologies in digital rhetoric and the latent values of virtual community networks.” (2020).

Imam, Aya. “Twitter, What’s The Verdict?”

Laconte, Stephen. “Taylor Swift Fans Are Attacking A Star Of ‘Ginny & Georgia’ After That ‘Deeply Sexist’ Joke — But She Had An Important Response.” BuzzFeed, 5 Mar. 2021, www.buzzfeed.com/stephenlaconte/taylor-swift-ginny-georgia-sexist-joke-antonia-gentry.

Lambert, Anthony, and Sarah Maguire. “Has cancel culture gone too far?” (2020).

Roos, Hailey. “With (Stan) ding Cancel Culture: Stan Twitter and Reactionary Fandoms.”  (2020).

Theriault, Liz. “From cancel culture to changing culture.” (2019).

Velasco, Joseph Ching. “You are Cancelled: Virtual Collective Consciousness and the Emergence of Cancel Culture as Ideological Purging.” Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities 12.5 (2020).

Welsh, Michael Tyler. Disruptive rhetoric in an age of outrage. Diss. 2020.

West, Kanye. “Famous.” YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lq2TmRzg19k

Understanding Literacy in Our Lives by Melanie Wroblewski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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• Social Issues
• Cancel Culture

In April of 2021, James Charles, a prominent beauty influencer, was "canceled" after admitting to sending sexually inappropriate messages to minors who he believed were adults, even though he hadn't t…

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Social media influencers and public figures have recently been victims of a new trend called "cancel culture." Which can potentially make them lose their careers and lives; should society let this con…

In a letter published to Harper's magazine, 150 influential journalists warned of the dangers of the rise of 'Cancel Culture' (Hao). Cancel Culture and its associated animosity has harmed countless li…

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"The future of our nation--will ultimately end up having to pay the price for America's cancel culture.." (Ullman) Cancel culture is a rapid boycott of anyone after saying something that is considered…

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George Santayana once said, "those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it." That is exactly what Cancel Culture is. A repeat of the past, known before as boycotting. Except this time,…

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Cancel Culture and the Power of Words

Key Takeaways:

• “Cancel culture” is a prominent way of ostracizing those who commit transgressions.
• The underlying principle beneath this phenomenon though is that words matter.
• Leaders have an especially strong influence on others so should be particularly thoughtful about the words they use.

Jim Jordan, U.S. representative for Ohio's 4th congressional district, recently said cancel culture is the number one issue facing America right now .  What is cancel culture?  It refers to being ostracized (either socially or professionally) from society or specific groups due to something said (often but not necessarily online).  This movement is related to the #metoo movement (which I have written about here before ). And it’s something leaders need to take seriously.

I would not agree that cancel culture is the most pressing issue this country is facing now, but in recent years, we have certainly seen a lot of examples of people being “canceled.”  Is this something we need to be concerned about?  In the context of organizations, do leaders need to be worried about being “canceled” if they say the wrong thing?

Cancel culture has a bad reputation — some people think it’s gone too far, and people are being punished for things that aren’t that bad.  I would argue that what we should be focusing on here is the idea that leaders need to be thoughtful about the words and language they use. 

I’m not here today to argue individual cases with you (or even to argue if “canceling” someone for what they said is or isn’t the appropriate punishment). But instead I argue the general principle underneath this phenomenon, that words matter, is not a bad thing and that good leaders should not have to worry about being canceled if they are thoughtful about their words.

Many argue that cancel culture is just about being politically correct — and in fact, believe that being politically incorrect can be a good thing for leaders because they are seen as more honest, authentic, and “real.” But a study by Mads Arnestad (2019) showed this is not true [1] .

Arnestad looked at two different scenarios where a leader said either a politically correct or incorrect statement and measured how others perceived the leader. Rather than seeing the politically incorrect leader as more honest, this leader was actually seen as less trustworthy. It was the politically correct leader who was seen as more trustworthy in both scenarios.

Therefore, if the argument against cancel culture is “it’s just being politically correct, and we should just tell it like it is and not worry about our words,” Arenestad’s study shows us that being leaders who are always politically correct is actually a good thing.

Why is it that being politically correct (and therefore, to some extent, “worrying about our words”) can be a good thing?  Because language and words matter.  Crystal Garcia and colleagues (2020) looked at publicly available documents at 31 U.S. higher education institutions released to communicate about diversity [2] . They found that the language and words that are used have the power to either perpetuate inequality or dismantle it. They also found that there is even power in deciding what to address.  In short, the words and language people use do matter and can have an effect on others.

Furthermore, leaders matter. Faithful readers who follow my work here on Lead Read Today know that I have written about this quite a bit. Leaders have the ability to influence their followers’ support for diversity and diversity training as well as their helping behaviors .  If words matter, then the words of leaders matter even more.

At the end of the day, do I believe leaders should be “canceled” if they say the wrong thing?  Individual cases vary, and I don’t think it makes sense to make broad statements for all situations. 

What I would say, though, is that the cause of cancel culture (i.e., “saying the wrong thing”) is something that deserves consideration. As a leader, you hold a large amount of influence and power over others, and the words you choose are a big part of that.  Be thoughtful in your language so it is a force for good and not inadvertently for bad.

[1] Arnestad, M. N. (2019). Politically incorrect statements do not make leaders seem more trustworthy: Randomized experiments exploring the perceptual consequences of political incorrectness. Management Communication Quarterly, 33 , 363–387.

[2] Garcia, C. E., Arnberg, B., Weise, J., & Winborn, M. (2020). Institutional responses to events challenging campus climates: Examining the power in language. Journal of Diversity in Higher Education, 13 , 345–354.

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10 Comments

The very phrase "cancel culture" is an invention of the right wing. The fact that you are taking it at face value and not questioning it is all is limiting your analysis. There is no such thing as "cancel culture." The phrase seeks to delegitimize criticism from the public. It is a knee jerk reaction to not being able to get away with saying/doing things people used to be able to get away with. Having to face consequences does not equal "cancel culture."

Cancel culture isn't a thing. Accountability and consequences for saying something purposefully derogatory, racist, homophobic, xenophobic, sexist, etc. is certainly a thing. Let's hope that never changes. We can believe in the 1st Amendment and in the accountability for our words. Those who want to say whatever they want without consequence claim 'cancel culture'. It's usually after they realize the gig is up on their privilege to say whatever they want about whomever they want without accountability. If you can't handle the blowback you you shouldn't say it.

This article is as biased as it comes. Cancel culture IS a thing. Events like Gina Carano's firing from "The Madalorian" due to a tweet that had nothing to do with offensive content, is a prime example. People should be ashamed of themselves if they think it's okay to ruin someone's way of feeding their family or providing for themselves. That kind of pressure to companies to fire people for saying wrong words is abhorrent. You might as well be saying, "This person said something offensive, therefore they should not be able to make money, and they should be thrown on the streets to starve and die." I don't understand why people who support this bigotry do not see that.

You should spend some time defining "cancelling." What is it? My definition would be something like "de-platforming" i.e., cancelling social media accounts or removing books from distribution. In this context, it is undeniable that there is a recent trend of cancelling voices that platform owners consider offensive or insensitive. I believe this is what people mean by "cancel culture." The question is not whether public figures should be held accountable for their speech, but whether Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and others should censor speech that they deem inappropriate.

Jim Jordan is using the phrase "cancel culture" because it is a cute alliteration and was most likely created by Frank Luntz. Furthermore, Jordan likely is parroting boilerplate from the Republican National Committee.

Republicans like Jordan are supposed to be so very strong, but when someone is dismissive of them (which is what they now term "canceling"), then they are weak and defenseless and need to run to Fox "News" to cry about it.

I am disappointed that this article did not dismiss the made-up concept of "cancel culture".

This author is focused on one aspect of cancel culture - the importance of the words and actions of our leaders. Certainly, the words and actions of our leaders matter. What's vague, though, is how leadership is defined here. Should we narrow "leadership" in this context to elected leaders? How about leaders at our university? Leaders of our social groups? Leaders of our place of employment? Leaders in our homes?... I could go on.

Aren't we ALL leaders of something?

Then, what the article misses is that cancel culture affects EVERYONE - even if the scope is supposedly limited to "leadership".

Let's re-scope this a little bit and say that, for the sake of this article and the research cited within, that we'll define "leadership" to just the leadership provided by our elected leaders in government. The argument presented still only tackles part of pressing issue of cancel culture. For it is our elected leaders who should be protecting average Americans from cancel culture. So, it is the responsibility of those leaders - as we've narrowly defined them for the time being - to (1) take great care of the words they use and actions they chose AND (2) take great care in protecting average Americans from being canceled. Unfortunately, the article skips right over the second part.

Consider Bill Maher's thoughts on cancel culture (with examples)... "Memo to social justice warriors: when what you're doing sounds like an Onion headline, stop." https://twitter.com/billmaher/status/1365537755237818368

Any discussion about cancel culture that stops before addressing the canceling of average Americans is quite short-sighted.

I agree with your thoughts on cancel culture today. I would disagree that the "cancelling" is only taking place with words spoken today. I am more interested in the presentism argument (something notably missing from your work here) where what was said or done before has become unacceptable in today's more diversified world. Today we blame or 'cancel" these people for past transgressions that were perfectly acceptable in a less diverse society. Do we remove any trace of these transgressions at the risk of removing learning opportunities, even if hurtful to people? Of course, I am in total agreement that our leaders today should not say whatever is on their minds. They are leaders for a reason and should always consider how their words will affect all people, but this has not always been the status quo.

I am shocked and afraid of the two people who have replied here. Words do matter, but so does understanding. Is there no forgiveness or room for discussing understanding? "Cancel Culture" refers to more than an angry mob of faceless masses, it also refers to lost jobs, severed relationships and real world consequences beyond just words. Maybe you're not aware? Or if so, how cruel can you be? This could lead to a quiet, underground uprising as those vocal have muted the other half. And that is also terrifying.

Someone who has lost income or their voice online based on their Christian and conservative beliefs is very real. Yes we all need to be mindful of our speech and be a loving people. We are called to love one another. I think it's wrong to censor speech, no matter what.

And who are these "Angels" in our society that get to decide what is unacceptable and deserves "consequences"? The one with the biggest and fastest autoreply? The one who gets the biggest check/platform from Soros? My button's bigger than yours? I don't feel a need to suppress another's first amendment. Its called a freedom, friends. If its insulting to me, I put on my big boy pants and move on.

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What the New York Times' college cancel culture essay gets wrong about censorship

The New York Times opinion section published an essay from a University of Virginia student Monday about her dismay that students often censor themselves on college campuses to avoid controversy. Emma Camp’s thoughtful meditation on what it’s like to have unpopular political and social views in college is the latest entry into America’s ongoing cancel culture debate and, accordingly, it’s become a source of criticism and argument online .

As someone who held some deeply unpopular views on my college campus during the Bush era, I’ve experienced some of what Camp described and, arguably, worse. (More on that later.) But I would say I wasn’t being censored as much as I was experiencing the social consequences of taking positions outside my community's parameters of consensus. And ultimately I think it was a good thing: I learned that meaningful dissent necessarily entails confrontation and discomfort — but that there is dignity and strength to be found in steeling oneself in the face of overwhelming disagreement.

It’s unclear if there’s anything inherently worrisome about data suggesting that students often censor themselves.

Camp touched on several different points in her op-ed, but her core argument rested on a 2021 survey of tens of thousands of college students finding that "80 percent of students self-censor at least some of the time" and 48 percent of undergrads "described themselves as 'somewhat uncomfortable' or 'very uncomfortable' with expressing their views on a controversial topic during classroom discussions."

The cited data is unpersuasive as proof of a plague of conformity for a couple of reasons. First, there are no historical comparison points. Is self-censorship something fundamentally new? Is it actually rising, as Camp implies? After all, some data from the past several years indicates that support for free speech among college students outpaces support among adults in general ; that support for free speech is correlated with college education ; and that free speech crises at colleges, such as a student-run plays being canceled because they're perceived by some as offensive, are, while troubling, rare events.

Secondly, it’s unclear if there’s anything inherently worrisome about data suggesting that students often censor themselves. Declining to speak completely freely is always going to be a general condition of social existence in the adult world. It’s a socially adaptive trait to say different kinds of things around different people, and everyone makes use of it all the time: People have different conversational ranges and understandings of what’s appropriate to talk about with family, friends, neighbors, co-workers, doctors, in-laws and bosses. And since by definition controversial viewpoints will repel and often inspire pushback from interlocutors, it makes perfect sense that there will frequently be situations where people will be hesitant to express them.

Camp argued that this self-censorship is driven by the fact that “the consequences for saying something outside the norm can be steep.” But she provided little evidence of severe penalties. The overwhelming majority of consequences she described in detail involved students feeling uncomfortable or unhappy about others disagreeing with them, sometimes en masse. A conservative student informed Camp that he enters “survival mode” when politics comes up and that “I tense up a lot more, because I’ve got to think very carefully about how I word things. It’s very anxiety inducing.” Camp herself described feeling “shaken” by her class getting angry at her for saying it's OK for non-Indian women to criticize the historical cultural ritual of suttee in India. Another student relayed the humiliation of enduring “a succession of people” disagreeing with her comment about sexism in media, discouraging her from speaking up in class. Camp also cites examples of students lowering their voices or shutting doors on campus to avoid drawing attention to opinions that stray from convention, and losing friends over her writing on free expression.

These kinds of anecdotes do not conjure up the image of a new culture of conformity and "public shaming" but rather the timeless reality of what it means to articulate unpopular opinions. I experienced this firsthand in college, and it was a critical learning experience.

For my undergraduate degree, I attended George Washington University, which, because it’s in the heart of the nation’s capital, attracted a great many students who trusted in and were deeply invested in the two-party political system. They touted their centrist positions as they vied for internships and access to Washington’s social networks, and were eager to work in government. As a leftist, I stood far outside the ethos of the student body and remained at odds with many students and student activists in both parties on issues of domestic politics and foreign policy during the George W. Bush era. It was a time when post-9/11 jingoism was still raging, and neoliberal governance was not viewed as a policy regime, but simply the natural order of the world.

Heated debates with other students over the nature and morality of capitalism were a routine occurrence for me. In one class, some students regularly rolled their eyes when I raised my hand, and it was common to be rebuked by a succession of people. At guest lectures, I was sometimes booed for passionately disagreeing with speakers. When my activist friends and I engaged with the mainstream student body on a range of issues, it could quickly get acrimonious.

And the social costs were real. Someone I considered a friend spat at my feet and declined to speak to me ever again after we clashed over how to fight Islamophobia and neoconservatism on campus. A budding romantic relationship went cold after a disagreement about the Iraq War. At a peaceful protest alongside other leftie activists against an Israel Defense Forces war criminal , I wasn’t just jeered; I was physically assaulted.

Societies are held together by norms, and challenging them will always generate friction.

I did not perceive the unpleasant pushback I experienced as aimed at silencing me or encouraging me to self self-censor. Rather, I viewed it as a function of clashing with other people’s value systems on questions that often had life-or-death stakes and were tied to fundamental questions of human liberty. Yes, there are mindless conformists out there, and the thoughtlessness of pile-ons from such people can grate. But the primary reason that my dissent from mainstream opinion on campus was contentious was because of the moral substance at play — we were involved in real confrontations over what’s right, what’s wrong and what must be done to make the world more just.

And this is what I would ask Camp to reflect on — the impossibility of avoiding the chance of isolation while engaged in serious dissent. A world in which every topic under the sun can be discussed entirely dispassionately and with equal regard for every opinion doesn't exist. First of all, societies are held together by norms, and challenging them will always generate friction. Second, most issues that inspire passion in college debate tend to do so because of their political and moral content — and it only makes sense that these issues can drive people apart. If people actually believe in what they're saying, then debate will necessarily make some people dislike each other.

My activist and debate experiences in college could be challenging and painful at times, but mostly they invigorated me. I learned to hold my own against a crowd — a prerequisite for becoming a free thinker, and it certainly helps if you go on to become a journalist. While expressing my niche views did result in the end of a few friendships, it also opened me up to others — people whom I got along with based on overlapping worldviews or based on a shared interest in debate despite some disagreements. I learned, too, the value of sometimes setting aside political discussions and reveling in all the other dimensions of interpersonal connection.

None of this is to say that there are no reasons for concern about intellectual conformity, free expression and public shaming in our culture in our age. I, myself, am a critic of some of the punitive aspects of our public culture online and tribalism in debate , and in years past I have reported on what I found to be concerning incidents of anti-free speech ideas on college campuses. But complaints of a culture of self-censorship as illustrated by discomfort with being piled on in class don't seem to meet the threshold for worrisome.

There is no arena in which dissent from consensus on the big questions of the day won’t cause some discomfort and even isolation. That isn’t censorship. That’s the price of having one’s own opinion.

Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for MSNBC Daily. Previously, he worked at Vox, HuffPost and Politico, and he has also been published in, among other places, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Nation, and The Intercept. You can sign up for his free politics newsletter here .