cancel culture essay introduction

Cancel Culture: The Adverse Impacts Essay

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

Planning the Introduction

Planning the body of your essay, planning the conclusion.

Topic sentence: Public shaming has been around since ancient times. Only recently, Gen Z created the term cancel culture to refer to the modern form of public shaming. Cancel culture refers to the practice of an individual or company stopping a public organization or figure after they have said or done something offensive or objectionable (Hassan, 2021).

The following paper bases its idea on three facts:

• Cancel culture simplifies intricate problems and promotes hasty judgments.
• Cancel culture has prompted individuals to ask for forgiveness without typically comprehending the weight of their deeds.
• Cancel culture is an invasion of privacy; it involves criminal threats and might drive an individual to suicide.

Thesis: There are positive effects of cancel culture, such as holding people accountable; however, it is a harmful and wrongful act, and people should not condone it.

Supporting Evidence Paragraph #1

Topic Sentence: The increased awareness of cancel culture has promoted sudden judgments and simplified complex problems.

Explain Topic Sentence: Often, there is a definite contrast between wrong and right. However, in a situation whereby people are constantly searching for mistakes, they may not know it and can be quick to judge (Romano, 2021).

Introduce Evidence: For instance, politicians and other individuals have used cancel culture to coerce people (Romano, 2021).

Concluding Sentence: The acts of cancel culture stop people from sharing their opinions even though that is the appropriate or necessary action.

Supporting Evidence Paragraph #2

Topic Sentence: Additionally, the current cancel culture has led to the perpetrator routinely asking for forgiveness for their past errors after a public outcry (Romano, 2021).

Explain Topic Sentence: The main problem with this outcome is that these individuals solely ask for forgiveness after the public outcry and not after personally acknowledging their mistakes.

Introduce Evidence: For instance, according to Hassan, people should reach out to the perpetrator and constructively share their thoughts and expose their faulty logic instead of calling them out (Hassan, 2021).

Concluding Sentence: Cancel culture affects the habits of individuals negatively. For instance, it causes people to senselessly apologize to people without understanding the cause of the problem.

Supporting Evidence Paragraph #3

Topic Sentence: Unquestionably, cancel culture is toxic when it entails driving an individual to suicide, privacy invasion, or criminal threats (Hassan, 2021).

Explain Topic Sentence: The nature of most social media comments appears to demonstrate that cancel culture does not necessarily result in positive social change. Cancel culture spreads hate online, just like cyberbullying (Hassan, 2021).

Introduce Evidence: For instance, cancelling culture is illegal since hate crimes are prohibited.

Concluding Sentence: The violation of civil rights is viewed as a crime in America, and cancel culture denies citizens who disagree with other people to speak.

Counterargument

Topic Sentence: The advantage of cancel culture is that it typically gives people who have not heard the platform to call out injustices and voice their opinions through social media. It makes individuals impact real-life situations, such as raising awareness against ableism, sexism, or racism. For instance, a canceled entertainer such as Roseanne Barr lost her job and fans after making a racist tweet (Romano, 2020).

Concluding Sentence: When correctly used, cancel culture gives absolute power to everyday people and allows them to have such a significant impact in a virtual setting. However, the problem with this outcome is that the legal system does not share the perceptions towards the deviant behavior done by the canceled individuals.

Topic Sentence: In conclusion, the positive effect of cancel culture does not supersede the adverse impacts of cancel culture, which is harmful and wrongful. Cancel culture should not be allowed. Most individuals think it is an essential social justice tool, especially in an environment with substantial power imbalances between influential public figures and the affected communities and individuals. However, cancel culture has become uncontrollable and has allowed other individuals to invade people’s privacy, leading to senseless apologies while encouraging lawlessness.

Concluding Sentence: Cancel culture is unavoidable in today’s society, but optimistically, people should make a more positive culture with fair criticism.

Public shaming has been around since ancient times. Only recently, Gen Z created the term cancel culture to refer to the modern form of public shaming. Cancel culture refers to the practice of an individual or company stopping a public organization or figure after they have said or done something offensive or objectionable (Hassan, 2021). The following paper bases its idea on three facts: cancel culture simplifies intricate problems and promotes hasty judgments, quickly bringing outrageously severe outcomes in less harsh circumstances. Secondly, cancel culture has prompted individuals to ask for forgiveness without typically comprehending the weight of their deeds. Lastly, cancel culture is an invasion of privacy; it involves criminal threats and might drive an individual to suicide. There are positive effects of cancel culture, such as holding people accountable; however, it is a harmful and wrongful act, and people should not condone it.

The increased awareness of cancel culture has promoted sudden judgments and simplified complex problems. These deeds can easily result in outrageously severe outcomes in less harsh circumstances. Often, there is a definite contrast between wrong and right. However, in a situation whereby people are constantly searching for mistakes, they may not know it and can be quick to judge. For instance, politicians and other individuals have used cancel culture to coerce people (Romano, 2021). The acts of cancelling culture stop people from sharing their opinions even though that is the appropriate or necessary action.

Additionally, the current cancellation culture has led to the perpetrator routinely asking for forgiveness for their past errors after a public outcry. The main problem with this outcome is that these individuals solely ask for forgiveness after the public outcry and not after personally acknowledging their mistakes (Romano, 2021). For instance, according to Hassan, people should reach out to the perpetrator and constructively share their thoughts and expose their faulty logic instead of calling them out. Cancel culture affects the habits of individuals negatively. For instance, it causes people to senselessly apologize to people without understanding the cause of the problem.

Unquestionably, cancel culture is toxic when it entails driving an individual to suicide, privacy invasion, or criminal threats. The nature of most social media comments appears to demonstrate that cancelling culture does not necessarily result in positive social change (Hassan, 2021). Similar to cyberbullying, cancel culture spreads hate online. For instance, cancelling culture is illegal since hate crimes are prohibited. The violation of civil rights is viewed as a crime in America, and cancel culture denies citizens who disagree with other people to speak.

The advantage of cancel media is that it typically gives people who have not heard the platform to call out injustices and voice their opinions through social media. It makes individuals impact real-life situations, such as raising awareness against ableism, sexism, or racism. For instance, a canceled entertainer such as Roseanne Barr lost her job and fans after making a racist tweet (Romano, 2020). When correctly used, cancel culture gives absolute power to everyday people and allows them to have such a significant impact in a virtual setting. However, the problem with this outcome is that the legal system does not share the perceptions towards the deviant behavior done by the canceled individuals.

In conclusion, the positive effect of cancel culture does not supersede the adverse impacts of cancel culture, which is harmful and wrongful. Cancel culture should not be allowed. Ordinary folks have been vigilant of individuals who have rejected their values and morals. These deeds of public humiliation have always existed. In the age of social media and technology, social shaming has taken a new name called the cancel culture. Most individuals think it is an essential social justice tool, especially in an environment with substantial power imbalances between influential public figures and the affected communities and individuals. However, cancel culture has become uncontrollable and has allowed other individuals to invade people’s privacy, leading to senseless apologies while encouraging lawlessness. Cancel culture is unavoidable in today’s society, but optimistically, people should make a more positive culture with fair criticism.

Hassan, S. A. (2021). Why cancel culture by anyone is harmful and wrong. Psychology today. Web.

Romano, A. (2020). Why we can’t stop fighting about cancel culture. Vox. Web.

Romano, A. (2021). The second wave of ”cancel culture.” Vox. Web.

• Race Matters, Cancel Culture, and “Boys Go to Jupiter”
• Cancel Culture: A Persuasive Speech
• Generation Z Through George Orwell’s “1984” Lens
• Teens and Representatives of Minorities: Accessing Contraception
• “Tragedy of the Commons” in Modern Society
• The Effects of Video Games on the Brain by Paturel
• On Internet Addiction in Swift's Satirical Style
• Concept of Social Stratification
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2022, December 14). Cancel Culture: The Adverse Impacts. https://ivypanda.com/essays/cancel-culture-the-adverse-impacts/

"Cancel Culture: The Adverse Impacts." IvyPanda , 14 Dec. 2022, ivypanda.com/essays/cancel-culture-the-adverse-impacts/.

IvyPanda . (2022) 'Cancel Culture: The Adverse Impacts'. 14 December.

IvyPanda . 2022. "Cancel Culture: The Adverse Impacts." December 14, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/cancel-culture-the-adverse-impacts/.

1. IvyPanda . "Cancel Culture: The Adverse Impacts." December 14, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/cancel-culture-the-adverse-impacts/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Cancel Culture: The Adverse Impacts." December 14, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/cancel-culture-the-adverse-impacts/.

What is Cancel Culture?

• share on facebook
• share on twitter
• share on pinterest
• share on linkedin
• share on email

Each of us can probably recall an embarrassing “caught” moment. Whether it was more innocent—like taking a cookie without permission as a kid—or more serious—like cheating on a test or a significant other—we all have moments when we go against our better judgment and, when caught, immediately feel foolish. In many of these cases, the consequences and repercussions of those actions remain a personal issue that we can learn and move on from without permanently damaging our reputations.

But what if you’re a celebrity? In our social-media-driven world, it’s easier than ever to find the tea about prominent figures. As more and more stories come out about questionable actions from celebrities and influencers, people are becoming quicker to judge and “canceling” those who have made questionable statements or actions. In some cases it can provide much-needed accountability, but for many others it has become an example of forgetting grace and eliminating one’s chance to learn from their mistakes. Gen Z is growing up in a cancel culture , and it’s important for us as parents and caring adults to know what it is and how it’s impacting them.

What is cancel culture?

The term “ canceled ” means to delete something or someone out of your life. As the instances of public “canceling” have increased over the past few years, it’s become its own culture . While you can cancel just about anyone or anything you want, “cancel culture” has become the mass-movement of revoking privileges, taking away platforms, and trying to blacklist celebrities and powerful figures—sometimes for something that happened decades prior.

Cancel culture generally happens on (but is not limited to) apps like TikTok and Twitter , and spreads through user-created hashtags, usually following a #___isover format (some recent hashtags include #lanadelreyisover and #jimmyfallonisover). Reasons for why someone is considered “over” vary, but for the ones mentioned, Lana Del Rey was accused of being racist in a post about how she feels her music is wrongfully criticized, and Jimmy Fallon was accused of being racist when a video of him using blackface on SNL 20 years ago resurfaced. Racism, homophobia, sexism, sexual misconduct, and overall frowned upon behavior can all be triggers for cancel culture.

How long has it been a thing? Should I be concerned?

The term “cancel” first originated from a line in the ‘90s movie New Jack City , but didn’t begin to take off until the 2010s. After a 2014 episode of Love and Hip-Hop: New York aired in which one character breaks up with his girlfriend by saying “you’re canceled,” the phrase began to take off on Black Twitter .  It eventually made its way into mainstream culture, moving from a phrase you would use around your friends in a funny way to a phrase you would use to promote boycotting a celebrity whose actions you disagreed with.

One of the most notable springboards of cancel culture is the #MeToo movement , where canceling has been used to call out actual crimes committed by powerful figures. In some cases like Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein , there were factual, verifiable allegations that led to cancelation. With other proven-true cases like Aziz Ansari and Louis C.K. , their careers were certainly tainted after allegations, but have since resumed as they were before. However, other cases weren’t so cut-and-dry. Allegations of sexual assault against Cole Sprouse and Justin Bieber were actually found to be entirely false, making the cancelations misinformed and unnecessary.

Cancel culture drawbacks

The #MeToo movement is only a fraction of cancel stories. Cancel culture has grown substantially and will more than likely continue to do so. Nowadays, it’s all too common for a celebrity to be canceled for something they said or did, even if that action occurred years prior. Of course, we do not condone inappropriate language or behavior, but we do question the idea of canceling someone without room for grace, listening, or forgiveness of any kind.

One problem with cancel culture is that it’s just as fleeting as the regular news cycle. A celebrity can be canceled one day, forgiven and forgotten about the next. Stars like Kanye West, Jeffree Star, and Camila Cabello have all been canceled before, yet fans continue to support them as if nothing happened. In many cases, a quick apology post or video is enough for once-enraged people to move on and forget about someone’s cancelation altogether. This quick-fix is worth questioning: Do people participate in cancel culture as a way to fit in with their peers, or are their opinions and reasons for canceling someone legitimate?

Though many have been forgiven and forgotten, no public figure is safe from cancel culture. Whether it’s re-interpreting something a celebrity says, or deep-diving to find something controversial, cancel culture invades privacy with the intent to harm an individual rather than raise awareness for an issue.

How does cancel culture affect Gen Z?

Gen Z relies on social media to be in-the-know about their world, so it’s natural to assume that they’re usually aware of whoever has been canceled on a daily basis. They’re passionate about social justice and activism, and quick to rally together to use their voices against things they disagree with. However, along with this, teens’ brains have not fully developed yet, meaning their wisdom and discernment have yet to fully mature. With the consistent outpour of cancelations, Gen Z may wonder who and what to believe, and be quicker to judge a celebrity based on what their peers say rather than what the facts say. In an effort to feel included, teens may rely on what social media says when they form their own opinions.

Discussion questions

While it’s important to talk to your teens about the repercussions of discrimination and misconduct, it’s equally important to make them aware of the repercussions of posting things on social media for anyone to see, as well as how to navigate showing grace to those who have. Use these questions to start a conversation with your teen about cancel culture.

• Do you know what cancel culture is?
• Have any celebrities you follow been canceled? Do you know why?
• Have you personally canceled anyone from your life, whether you know them personally or not? Why?
• How do you find out about someone being canceled?
• Do you think cancel culture is healthy? What are some other ways you can hold people accountable for their actions?
• At what point do you think someone should be canceled versus giving them another chance to prove that they learned from their mistake?
• Do you think it’s okay to cancel someone just because they have an opinion you don’t agree with?

(P.S. Check out our Parent’s Guide to Cancel Culture to continue the conversation with your teen!)

The Culture Translator

A weekly email to help you stay up to date on the music, movies, TV shows, and social media trends impacting your kid’s world.

Related Posts

Two faces of christian deconstruction: is it always bad, should i let my teen listen to secular music, the masculinity of andrew tate, axis is a donor-funded ministry..

Help us keep the conversation going by donating today.

Cancel Culture and Other Myths

Anti-fandom as heartbreak.

A friend is about to give a guest lecture. She is paralyzingly nervous: “I don’t want to get canceled.” A colleague who is about to have an editorial published asks me to make sure there is nothing cancelable in it. When their work occurs without incident, I return to the terror that preceded their success. “You see, you weren’t canceled!” “Thank god,” they both reply, an oddly unifying utterance for two professed nontheists. The stakes of canceling are such that disbelievers reach for higher powers when spared.

I begin to ask everyone I meet what they think of when they think of cancel culture. A student tells me her grandparents complain, “It’s Salem all over again.” A friend tells me of a col­league who got fired for something they said on Slack. “Can you believe it?” she snaps. “Cancel culture ruins lives.”

I gather these instances and wonder whether cancel culture is an encroaching menace against which everyone must defend or a moral panic that inflates the problem. In a 2023 paper published in Political Studies , Pippa Norris poses the question this way: “Do claims about a growing ‘cancel culture’ curtailing free speech on college campuses reflect a pervasive myth, fueled by angry parti­san rhetoric, or do these arguments reflect social reality?” 1 Norris finds that contemporary academics may be less willing to speak up due to a fear of cancel culture. Cancel culture is not a myth, Norris decides, because, in silencing people, it does something real.

There is no question that cancel culture is real. It is also a myth.

Taking myths as real requires resistance to conventional usage. Seven myths about COVID-19 vaccines , yells one headline. Ten mega myths about sex , beckons another. Myth used this way refers to an idea people believe that is not true. This is a relatively recent connotation of myth. In the history of religion, myths are sto­ries people tell about forces more powerful than them described as superhuman. A superhuman force could be a god; it could be meteorology; it could be a corporation or a foreign state. Myths occur when human beings want to explain how mysterious things come to pass. Their explanation is: “Something more powerful than us did something to make this happen.”

Cancel culture produces a collection of myths within a particu­lar tradition or a mythology. Depending on your political inclina­tions, the cast of gods and heroes alters considerably. The question is what mystery cancel culture’s mythology explains. Thinking about this requires thinking a little about religion, and a lot about what hurts people most.

Why does cancel culture feel so weighty when its material impacts are so comparatively slight?

The history of religions is a history of organizing power rela­tions. If this premise isn’t especially sexy to you, I commend the many Netflix films about religion where you can watch charismatic figures lull followers with promises of new dawns and off-the-grid togetherness. A lot of people who Netflix and chill do not iden­tify religiously, but everybody knows a heartbreak authored by a devastating player. “Something in the way you move / Makes me feel like I can’t live without you,” sings Rihanna in “Stay,” her 2012 blockbuster duet with Mikky Ekko. This is just one of hun­dreds of lovelorn tracks from the Top 40 that would serve well as a soundtrack for religion’s depiction in Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey (2022), Unorthodox (2020), and Wild Wild Country (2018).

Religion has a fair number of sexual mountebanks, but for a new religious movement to become an established religion, it needs to evolve from one-hit wonder to Beyoncé. New religious move­ments, sometimes derogatively called cults, offer ritual resolve for persons seeking solutions to their most profound questions and pain. Religions evolve from small cultic movements when, after the initial romance fades, individuals keep repeating things that other individuals repeat, and those communal repetitions come to constitute a form of belonging. If I say the Lord’s Prayer, the Jewish blessing over bread, or the Muslim salat, I am speaking individ­ually, but I am speaking in a way many other people speak, and when we hear each other speak it, we know who we are. The per­son who shows up at a Beyoncé concert and does not know a single lyric seems, to the Beyhive, like an outsider.

In her work on cancel culture, Pippa Norris does what many people do who imagine themselves outside myth’s power, namely take a myth as opposed to reality. But when you define a myth as a falsehood, you are not working to hear the myth’s believers on their terms. You are trying to correct them. You are trying to divest their false belief of its power. Religionists have a word for that, too: secularization .

The historic use of secularize was to convert from religious to secular possession or use, as when someone says, “the convent, secularized in 1973, is now a conference center.” Secularizing a building can happen with a single ritual. But calling someone else’s belief a lie—saying that there was no virgin birth, for example—doesn’t work so easily. Your cousin who won’t get vaccinated, the co-worker who repeats old lines about Pizzagate. No amount of fact-checking their utterances alters their view, because their view is not about the vaccine’s reality. It’s about how they feel when higher powers like The Government and Big Pharma required it. The more you deny what the believer believes, the bigger, not smaller, their belief becomes. Your debunking energizes their stori­fying. Have you ever tried to convince a Beyoncé fan that her voice isn’t that great, or that Rihanna is the better live performer? For sure you lost that one.

the mystery that I want to solve is why the idea of cancel culture is so powerful. In a 2020 essay addressing cancel culture, Ligaya Mishan writes, “It’s instructive that, for all the fear that cancel culture elicits, it hasn’t succeeded in toppling any major figures—high-level politicians, corporate titans—let alone institutions.” 2 This lack of large-scale monetary or institutional consequence has not dimmed the anxious hold that cancel culture has on the politi­cal conversation. Why does cancel culture feel so weighty when its material impacts are so comparatively slight?

Alan Dershowitz’s Cancel Culture: The Latest Attack on Free Speech and Due Process (2020) identifies cancel culture as the “illegitimate descendent” of both McCarthyism and Stalinism and blames it for stifling political free speech and artistic creativity as well as derail­ing the careers of prominent politicians, business executives, and academics. 3 For Dershowitz, the weight of cancel culture is how it silences debate and destroys individual careers. And yet this is wrong: never in human history have human beings been less silent or debated basic ideas of interrelation and power more.

The friend and colleague who worried to me about their pos­sible cancelations fretted because they thought they could lose job opportunities if they became stars of a story where they are called out for using their power at the lectern or on the page toward negative effects. There are prominent instances in the cancel cul­ture mythology of this occurring. Amy Cooper, a white woman who threatened a Black male birdwatcher, Christian Cooper, lost her job after the video of their Central Park encounter went viral. For Dershowitz and others who weaponize cancel culture, Amy Cooper’s firing is a prime exhibit that cancel culture has real effects.

There is no disputing that the behavior that led to Cooper’s firing occurred. The tape exists. She flipped out, and when she did, she pulled on racist language to do so. This is neither the first nor the last time someone was fired for behaving badly. Is using a wrong word in a lecture or a sentence in an editorial akin to behav­ing badly? No. Is it grounds for criticism? Yes. A part of the sign that cancel culture controls the mythological portion of the con­temporary shared social imagination is that it has convinced many people that criticism is itself a condemning act. To watch the video of Amy Cooper is to watch a person who could not take criticism in the moment of her meltdown. She doubled down in her ardency that she was in danger despite the reassurances that she was not. After she was fired, she did not author a public apology; she sued her employer for wrongful termination. She lost. Dershowitz would wager the woke mob had taken over her company’s Board of Trustees. A scholar of religion might observe she did not engage well the superhuman powers her virality offered her.

Language is the gladius in the battle royale cancel culture stages. Kevin Donnelly, editor of Cancel Culture and the Left’s Long March (2021), describes the endangering effect of cancel culture as a “rad­ical reshaping” of “language.” He complains that “under the head­ing of ‘equality, diversity, and inclusion’ academics and students are told they cannot use pronouns like he or she.” He continues: “Other examples of cancel culture radically reshaping language to enforce its neo-Marxist inspired ideology include replacing breastfeeding with chest feeding so as not to offend trans–people” and deciding words like elderly and pensioners are “ageist.” He concludes: “While the above examples might appear of little consequence, the reality is the way language is being manipulated is cause for concern.” 4

Celebrities know that to sustain their power they must cede some of what people say they are, including what people accuse them of being, even if mistaken.

Donnelly’s argument involves questionable assertions. Academics and students are not instructed in one hegemonic or unifying way; nobody is told what pronouns to use for themselves. But he is correct that a phobia that you will get the words wrong is one of the most basic terrors a person can have. Conservative critics have had such fearmongering traction with cancel culture because it taps into the primal embarrassment about saying the wrong thing. Cancel culture is therefore unsurprisingly marked as connected to contemporary campus life and, specifically, the humanities, where the fluency and acuity with language are curricular foci.

Critics on both sides of the political aisle wail about the heart­lessness of cancel culture’s quick-condemning appraisals. A con­servative Republican male-identified person replying to a recent Pew survey about the relationship between political vantage point and perception of cancel culture’s threat defines cancel culture as “destroying a person’s career or reputation based on past events in which that person participated, or past statements that person has made, even if their beliefs or opinions have changed.” A Democratic male-identified person defines it as “a synonym for ‘political cor­rectness,’ where words and phrases are taken out of context to bury the careers of people. A mob mentality.” This Republican and this Democrat agree that cancel culture gives no leeway for learning (“even if their beliefs or opinions have changed,” says the Republican) and no understanding of the specific situation (“taken out of context,” says the Democrat). 5 People are angry about cancel culture because it imprisons with no time off for good behavior. But discomfort around cancel culture may have less to do with absent compassion and more to do with who is now doing the talking and the canceling. As Danielle Butler wrote for The Root in 2018: “What people do when they invoke dog whistles like ‘cancel culture’ and ‘culture wars’ 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.” 6 As it happens, the Pew survey respondents are not racially identified. Butler invites us to wonder whether they were white people uncomfortable with being subject to nonwhite critique.

We might be able to frame cancel culture, then, in a different way: as a kind of fan rebuttal to the running story. The scholar Eve Ng writes, “Fandoms have a long history of organizing mass efforts around media texts, especially television shows, whose narratives and other elements of production might be influenced by viewer preferences.” 7 The viewer—of a TV show or a viral clip, say—directs what happens next through their reaction. Ng points out that cancel culture reflects larger patterns of social hierarchy, including gender, class, race, nation, and other axes of inequality. She suggests that fans in contemporary mediatized environments fight to articulate and undermine those hierarchies through their acts of intervention and protest.

In this sense, cancel culture also becomes a critical practice of what scholars like Jonathan Gray, Melissa Click, and others have described as anti-fandom . 8 Anti-fandom helps reshape received stories and actively responds to the narratives it witnesses. It is how fans express what they think they should no longer have to watch. Anti-fandom led readers to write to Dickens griping about what he did to Little Dorrit or viewers to write to the makers of Dallas for that one infamous cliffhanging whodunit. It includes readers tweeting about transphobic comments in the paper of record. The point isn’t to end the criticized piece of culture. It is to reclaim what the fan wants most from it. “J. K. Rowling gave us Harry Potter; she gave us this world,” said a young adult author who volunteers for the fan site MuggleNet. “But we created the fandom, and we created the magic and community in that fandom. That is ours to keep.” 9 Harry Potter fans seize back from the stories what they want; they don’t need a celebrated charismatic figure to do so. Myths survive longest when their authors become invisible, with the story becoming every speaker’s first-person speech.

The celebrities who survive the rites of criticism that comprise the common understanding of cancelation are those who make it their brand (see, for example, Jeffree Star or Kanye West) or those who accept that celebrity is always a delicate interrelation between fan and star, whom the fan figures as superhuman. Myth doesn’t sustain its storifying power if people stop believing that its pow­ers have serious sway. Celebrities know that to sustain their power they must cede some of what people say they are, including what people accuse them of being, even if mistaken. Accept the terms of your deification. If you can’t stand the heat, you have no right to the power.

Trying to shift the words we use and the resultant stories a soci­ety tells will never be nonviolent. Canceling can sometimes reflect the ritual of sacrifice described by René Girard in Violence and the Sacred (1977). 10 A sacrifice is the act of slaughtering an animal or person or surrendering a possession as an offering to a superhuman power. According to Girard, the sacrificed thing—the person, ani­mal, or inanimate possession—is a surrogate victim. The point of the sacrificial killing is to organize a wee bit of violence in a highly localized way to avoid a grander violence. The surrogate victim, the sacrificed thing, becomes known as a scapegoat , a reference to the goat sent into the wilderness in Leviticus after the Jewish chief priest had symbolically laid the sins of the people upon it. Enlightenment philosophers hoped some of this violence could be ended through the formation of a social contract, but Girard believed the problem of violence, which is the primary problem that cancel culture seeks to redress, could only be solved with a lesser dose of violence. We might say that sacrifice becomes a requisite procedure for societies transitioning from one level of inclusion to another.

They are not pushing back because they hate the power that person has but because they are angry about how that teacher, that New Yorker, that famous comedian used their power.

In Girard’s scheme, comedian Dave Chappelle, “canceled” over transphobic comments in his stand-up (and, again, for the way he responded to his cancelation), is the surrogate victim ; transphobia is the sacrificial victim , the latent object of sacrifice. This is the double substitution which Girard wrote about: a singular person is sacri­ficed on behalf of a larger subject that the society seeks to cancel to slow its furtherance. Dave Chappelle gets yelled at because his mis­takes represent a bigger social problem that the community wants to contain, so that the problem does not get bigger.

I observe how intensely intimate this is. The people who sac­rifice Chappelle are not newcomers to him—they are people who knew him, even believed in him and liked his edgy voice. He had to be sacrificed, but that was upsetting, disappointing, disheartening.

Canceling isn’t a situation where a random person, animal, or pos­session is brought into a community and sacrificed. It only carries meaning if it is something held close, something you nicknamed and loved and wanted never not to be there.

so, what is the measure of what we’re describing? Myths make many things happen that money does not measure. The colleague worrying about their editorial; the online commentator pound­ing out a defense of free speech; the right-wing radio host furious about critical race theory, and the Bernie-bro podcast host smart­ing about college feminists: none of them are feeling great. What is the measure of this lousy feeling?

Stress, I want to say, the stress it causes. On a beach walk I seek to compel an older colleague to retire after years of critical student feedback about his chauvinist speech and several failed efforts to reeducate the educator. Pressing, I ask: “Wouldn’t it just be more peaceful if you didn’t have to face those criticisms one semester more?” His wife, walking with us, interrupts: Yes, this is going to kill him. He’s going to die from a heart attack .

I am thinking about heart pain when I first read about the history of canceling as a locution in English. It was Black digital practices, specifically the operation of Black Twitter, that converted “cancel you” into a social intervention. 11 Journalist Clyde McGrady traced the origins of cancel used in this way back to Black singer-songwriter Nile Rodgers, who co-wrote the 1981 song “Your Love Is Cancelled” for his funk and disco band Chic. 12 In the song, a guy speaks to his ex-girl. “Just look at what you’ve done,” the speaker sings. “Got me on the run / Took me for a ride, really hurt my pride.” The singer is wounded by how vulnerable they were, angry that their once-upon beloved seduced them, then dropped them.

I am listening to this Chic song and thinking about heart pain not because I am stressed about cancel culture but because I am in a period of heartache. I am in love and in pain about love. Listening to a lot of soul music, crying late at night on the phone, seeing in every astrological report more reasons to weep. The whole history of R&B is a howl from the gurney about the pain of stressed hearts. About the pain of mistake, of wishing you could take it back, of wishing you were otherwise. Someone makes you a star of their life, then they don’t want you to be their fan, or they to be yours, anymore.

Chic’s “Your Love is Cancelled” preceded a scene in the 1991 film New Jack City in which the girlfriend of a gangster confronts him about his violence. “You’re a murderer, Nino,” she screams. Wesley Snipes, who plays Nino, shoves her onto a desk, douses her with champagne, and snaps to his associate, “Cancel that bitch. I’ll buy another one.” Hip-hop appropriation of that line—like when Lil Wayne rapped, “had to cancel that bitch like Nino,” in “I’m Single” (2010)—solidified the phrase’s public circulation. 13 The perspec­tive reflected in the song and the film is that of a person who is hurt and trying to triumph fiercely over that hurt. The speaker seeks to topple the figure that subjugates them. In both instances, men speak about canceling women who are voiceless. Their act of cancelation is at best unhealthy, a momentary derangement, vio­lent speech meant to hurt by reasserting their power. I loved you, I trusted you, and you betrayed me. Let me slam back in lyric and gesture that I will be just fine. I will be just fine. I will be just fine , without you .

There is a lot to say about what cancel culture is, what unites fans against a comedy set or a novel about a migrant’s experience or a teacher’s in-class utterance. To understand those most upset about cancel culture I must come to understand why people affirm some idea of their freedom over someone else’s idea of safety; why people call out sensitivity in one group while demonstrating through their reaction paper-thin emotional walls. You’re canceled is said between two parties, one of whom says it because they claim devastation at how poorly they’ve been cared for by the other. The other can’t believe it, unable to understand how their lover can speak this way. And suddenly I realize one way to describe cancel culture is as a violent reaction to heartbreak.

When worshipful attentions are withdrawn, the lacerating reverberation of myth’s interruption can­not be underestimated.

The students who cancel the teacher for their anti-Black remark; the New Yorkers who cancel Amy Cooper for soiling their public park; the fans who cancel Chappelle for transphobic remarks: they are not pushing back because they hate the power that person has but because they are angry about how that teacher, that New Yorker, that famous comedian used their power. The people calling for can­celation connect specific word choices to larger systems in which bigotry leads to massive social disparities. Mythologies explain that gods use power clumsily, and religions offer ways to survive while you grapple with the results of their fumble. Worship knits people back into community after drama and dereliction. Cancel culture is another mythic frame for a perennial ritual procedure by which people sift the good and the bad. It is painful because the world in which ritual exists is filled with preventable pain.

The marital liturgy in the 1522 Book of Common Worship includes a phrase, with my body I thee worship . What gets you to the altar where you might say these words? A lot of feeling, a lot of storifying. “Tell me about the day you met,” you might ask at a party. “Tell me how you knew you were in love.” Myths pour out in reply, stories of human action and cosmic fate that account for the mystery of love’s realization. The Book of Common Worship does not make myth visible. It records rituals that a particular religious tradition recommends for people to practice love, not storify it. To worship your body with mine. To attend to each other with care. To see each other as we are and to believe that person is someone worth seeing and seeing and seeing, again.

Myths are real. The anguish at canceling, the worry over being canceled, the sense that cancelation is what kids these days do—none of it makes sense outside the reality of the stories we tell to string ourselves to other people. When worshipful attentions are withdrawn, the lacerating reverberation of myth’s interruption can­not be underestimated. It’s an eruption, a tear at the fabric of what we hold dearest. So, to those who are worried about the stress of cancelation’s effects, I say what my friends say to me on the phone late at night, what they say over and over with the assuredness we have when heartbreak is heard. Try to learn from this. Know you will survive. And believe against all protesting pain, all teeth gnashing, notes left on windshields and marks left on your body, that you will be better for the lesson higher powers decided you needed to receive.

1. Pippa Norris, “Cancel Culture: Myth or Reality?” Political Studies 71, no. 1 (2023): 145–74.

2. Ligaya Mishan, “The Long and Tortured History of Cancel Culture,” New York Times Style Magazine, 3 December 2020.

3. Alan Dershowitz, Cancel Culture: The Latest Attack on Free Speech and Due Process (New York: Hot Books, 2020), 4.

4. Kevin Donnelly, “Cancel Culture and the Left’s Long March,” Spectator (Aus.), 16 March 2021.

5. Emily A. Vogels et al., “Americans and ‘Cancel Culture’: Where Some See Calls for Accountability, Others See Censorship, Punishment,” Pew Research Center, 19 May 2021.

6. Danielle Butler, “The Misplaced Hysteria About a ‘Cancel Culture’ That Doesn’t Actually Exist,” The Root, 23 October 2018.

7. Eve Ng, Cancel Culture: A Critical Analysis (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), 3.

8. Melissa A. Click, ed., Anti-Fandom: Dislike and Hate in the Digital Age (New York: New York University Press, 2019); Jonathan Gray, Dislike-Minded: Media, Audiences, and the Dynamics of Taste (New York: New York University Press, 2021).

9. Julia Jacobs, “Harry Potter Fans Reimagine Their World Without Its Creator,” New York Times, 12 June 2020.

10. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred , translated by Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977).

11. On the origin of “cancel” in the Black vernacular tradition, see Meredith D. Clark, “DRAG THEM: A Brief Etymology of So-called ‘Cancel Culture,’” Communication and the Public 5, no. 3–4 (2020): 88–92.

12. Clyde McGrady, “The Strange Journey of ‘Cancel’ from a Black-Culture Punchline to a White-Grievance Watchword,” Washington Post, 2 April 2021.

13. Aja Romano, “The Second Wave of ‘Cancel Culture,’” Vox , 5 May 2021.

Rachel Cusk

Renaissance women, fady joudah, you might also like, a moral education, the journalist and the photographer, nothing is a memory, new perspectives, enduring writing..

Support our award-winning little magazine. Subscribe to The Yale Review and receive four print issues per year.

Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World

Read our research on:

Full Topic List

Regions & Countries

• Publications
• Our Methods
• Short Reads
• Tools & Resources

Read Our Research On:

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.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter

Fresh data delivered Saturday mornings

1615 L St. NW, Suite 800 Washington, DC 20036 USA (+1) 202-419-4300 | Main (+1) 202-857-8562 | Fax (+1) 202-419-4372 |  Media Inquiries

Research Topics

• Email Newsletters

ABOUT PEW RESEARCH CENTER  Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of  The Pew Charitable Trusts .

© 2024 Pew Research Center

The second wave of “cancel culture”

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

If you buy something from a Vox link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement.

by Aja Romano

“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.

• “Wokeness is a problem and we all know it”

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.”

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.

• The “free speech debate” isn’t really about free speech

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.

Most Popular

The best — and worst — criticisms of trump’s conviction, take a mental break with the newest vox crossword, what’s really happening to grocery prices right now, big milk has taken over american schools, we need to talk more about trump’s misogyny, today, explained.

Understand the world with a daily explainer plus the most compelling stories of the day.

More in Explainers

Dopamine, explained

How worried should we be about Russia putting a nuke in space?

The video where Diddy attacks Cassie — and the allegations against him — explained

The known unknowns about Ozempic, explained

The controversy over Gaza’s death toll, explained

Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso,” the song of summer, explained

Billie Eilish vs. Taylor Swift: Is the feud real? Who’s dissing who?

What Trump really thinks about the war in Gaza

What ever happened to the war on terror?

The MLB’s long-overdue decision to add Negro Leagues’ stats, briefly explained

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

10 Theses About Cancel Culture

What we talk about when we talk about “cancellation.”

By Ross Douthat

Opinion Columnist

Cancel culture is destroying liberalism. No, cancel culture doesn’t exist. No, it has always existed; remember when Brutus and Cassius canceled Julius Caesar? No, it exists but it’s just a bunch of rich entitled celebrities complaining that people can finally talk back to them on Twitter. No, it doesn’t exist except when it’s good and the canceled deserve it. Actually, it does exist, but — well, look, I can’t explain it to you until you’ve read at least four open letters on the subject.

These are just a few of the answers that you’ll get to a simple question — “What is this cancel culture thing, anyway?” — if you’re foolish enough to toss it, like chum, into the seething waters of the internet. They’re contradictory because the phenomenon is complicated — but not complicated enough to deter me from making 10 sweeping claims about the subject.

So here goes:

1. Cancellation, properly understood, refers to an attack on someone’s employment and reputation by a determined collective of critics, based on an opinion or an action that is alleged to be disgraceful and disqualifying.

“Reputation” and “employment” are key terms here. You are not being canceled if you are merely being heckled or insulted — if somebody describes you as a moron or a fascist or some profane alternative to “Douthat” on the internet — no matter how vivid and threatening the heckling becomes. You are decidedly at risk of cancellation, however, if your critics are calling for you to be de-platformed or fired or put out of business , and especially if the call is coming from inside the house — from within your professional community, from co-workers or employees or potential customers or colleagues, on a professional message board or Slack or some interest-specific slice of social media.

2. All cultures cancel; the question is for what, how widely and through what means.

There is no human society where you can say or do anything you like and expect to keep your reputation and your job. Reputational cancellation hung over the heads of Edith Wharton’s heroines; professional cancellation shadowed 20th-century figures like Lenny Bruce. Today, almost all critics of cancel culture have some line they draw, some figure — usually a racist or anti-Semite — that they would cancel, too. And social conservatives who criticize cancel culture, especially, have to acknowledge that we’re partly just disagreeing with today’s list of cancellation-worthy sins.

3. Cancellation isn’t exactly about free speech, but a liberal society should theoretically cancel less frequently than its rivals.

The canceled individual hasn’t lost any First Amendment rights, because there is no constitutional right to a particular job or reputation. At the same time, under its own self-understanding, liberalism is supposed to clear a wider space for debate than other political systems and allow a wider range of personal expression. So you would expect a liberal society to be slower to cancel, more inclined to separate the personal and the professional (or the ideological and the artistic), and quicker to offer opportunities to regain one’s reputation and start one’s professional life anew.

“It’s a free country,” runs the American boast, and even if it doesn’t violate the Constitution, cancellation cuts against that promise — which is one reason arguments about cancel culture so often become arguments about liberalism itself.

Here’s What Cancel Culture Looked Like in 1283

The internet didn’t invent the angry mob..

Get your self-gratification! Can’t have a canceling without self-gratification! You are hereby sentenced to be publicly canceled by having thy head smoked — This will be a good one. Yea, love a good canceling! She’s been canceled, yeah? Shh! Shut out, on the bog pile of shame for the crime of saying something offensive 11 years ago! [cheers] 11 years ago! Let’s judge past statements by present-day perspective. It’s like saying the same thing today, kinda! Don’t I get a trial? No! This is a canceling. No due process. We are the jury! Our anger makes us qualified. Plus, we’re all perfect. Yea, we’re all perfect! You may be granted a reprieve if you apologize. Of course, I apologize. I’m sorry that you were offended. Sorry that we’re offended? That’s a non-apology. That’s worse than saying nothing. Well, if apologizing makes it worse, what’s the point of apologizing at all? She hates apologizing! Cancel her even more. Cancel her! Fare thee well, and may you never again utter the phrase, “[Expletive] the peasants!” [gasps] He just said something bad about peasants. I‘m a peasant, and I’m offended. No, I said, uh, she said, “[Expletive] the peasants!” Oh my god! He said it again. No, I love peasants. I would never say “[Expletive] — ” Cancel him! [chanting] I apologize, unreservedly. That’s not a good enough apology. I thought it was all right. An apology apologist! He’s for apologies. Get him. Oh hang on hang on. I’m confused. Are we against him, for being for apologies? Or against her, for being against apologies? Because — That’s irrelevant. What matters is that you’re angry. Cancel him! [chanting] But we’re supposed to be canceling her! Well, that was whole minutes ago. Who knows? Things we say today might be offensive in the future. She’s right, you might have offended me in the future. Well, you might be offending me in the future right now. Pre-cancel! Pre-cancel! It’s a pre-canceling! I hereby increase your taxes by 150 percent. No? Well, I’m going to burn your crops too. I’ll just get on with it then, shall I? Could I come along? Yes, yes please. Age before beauty!

4. The internet has changed the way we cancel, and extended cancellation’s reach.

On the other hand, a skeptic might say that it wasn’t liberalism but space and distance that made America a free country — the fact that you could always escape the tyrannies of local conformism by “lighting out for the territory,” in the old Mark Twain phrase. But under the rule of the internet there’s no leaving the village: Everywhere is the same place, and so is every time. You can be canceled for something you said in a crowd of complete strangers, if one of them uploads the video, or for a joke that came out wrong if you happened to make it on social media, or for something you said or did a long time ago if the internet remembers. And you don’t have to be prominent or political to be publicly shamed and permanently marked : All you need to do is have a particularly bad day, and the consequences could endure as long as Google.

5. The internet has also made it harder to figure out whether speech is getting freer or less free.

When critics of cancel culture fret about a potential online-era chill on speech, one rejoinder is that you can find far more ideas — both radical and noxious — swirling on the internet than you could in a sampling of magazines and daily newspapers circa 1990. It’s easier to encounter ideological extremes on your smartphone than it was in the beforetime of print media, and easier to encounter hateful speech as well.

But at the same time the internet has hastened the consolidation of cultural institutions, so that The New York Times and the Ivy League and other behemoths loom larger than they did 30 years ago, and it’s arguably increased uniformity across cities and regions and industries in general. And the battle over norms for cancellation reflects both of these changes: For would-be cancelers, the chaos of the internet makes it seem that much more important to establish rigorous new norms, lest the online racists win … but for people under threat of cancellation, it feels like they’re at risk at being shut out of a journalistic or academic marketplace that’s ever more consolidated, or defying a consensus that’s embraced by every boardroom and H.R. department.

6. Celebrities are the easiest people to target, but the hardest people to actually cancel.

One of the ur-examples of cancel culture was the activist Suey Park’s 2014 hashtag campaign to #cancelColbert over a satirical tweet from the Twitter account of “The Colbert Report.” Six years later, Stephen Colbert is very much uncanceled. So are Dave Chappelle, J.K. Rowling and a much longer list of prominent pop culture figures who have faced online mobs and lived to tell, sell and perform.

Their resilience explains why some people dismiss cancellation as just famous people whining about their critics. If someone has a big enough name or fan base, the bar for actual cancellation is quite high, and the celebrity might even have the opportunity — like a certain reality-television star on the campaign trail in 2016 — to use the hatred of the would-be cancelers to confirm a fandom or cement a following.

However, not everyone is a celebrity, and …

7. Cancel culture is most effective against people who are still rising in their fields, and it influences many people who don’t actually get canceled.

The point of cancellation is ultimately to establish norms for the majority, not to bring the stars back down to earth. So a climate of cancellation can succeed in changing the way people talk and argue and behave even if it doesn’t succeed in destroying the careers of some of the famous people that it targets. You don’t need to cancel Rowling if you can cancel the lesser-known novelist who takes her side; you don’t have to take down the famous academics who signed last week’s Harper’s Magazine letter attacking cancel culture if you can discourage people half their age from saying what they think. The goal isn’t to punish everyone, or even very many someones; it’s to shame or scare just enough people to make the rest conform.

8. The right and the left both cancel; it’s just that today’s right is too weak to do it effectively.

Is it cancel culture when conservatives try to get college professors disciplined for anti-Americanism, or critics of Israel de-platformed for anti-Semitism? Sure, in a sense. Was it cancel culture when the Dixie Chicks — sorry, the artists formerly known as the Dixie Chicks — were dropped by radio stations and tour venues, or when Bill Maher’s “Politically Incorrect” was literally canceled, for falling afoul of patriotic correctness? Absolutely.

But as the latter examples suggest, the last peak of right-wing cultural power was the patriotically correct climate after Sept. 11, a cultural eon in the past. Today the people with the most to fear from a right-wing cancel culture usually work inside Trump-era professional conservatism. (And even for them there’s often a new life awaiting as a professional NeverTrumper.) Attempted cancellations on the right are mostly battles for control over diminishing terrain, with occasional forays against red-state academics and anti-Trump celebrities. Meanwhile, the left’s cancel warriors imagine themselves conquering the entire non-Fox News map.

9. The heat of the cancel-culture debate reflects the intersection of the internet as a medium for cancellation with the increasing power of left-wing moral norms as a justification for cancellation.

It’s not just technology or ideology, in other words, it’s both. The emergent, youthful left wants to take current taboos against racism and anti-Semitism and use them as a model for a wider range of limits — with more expansive definitions of what counts as racism and sexism and homophobia, a more sweeping theory of what sorts of speech and behavior threaten “harm” and a more precise linguistic etiquette for respectable professionals to follow. And the internet and social media, both outside institutions and within, are crucial mechanisms for this push.

It’s debatable whether these new left-wing norms would be illiberal or whether they would simply infuse liberalism with a new morality to replace the old Protestant consensus. It’s arguable whether they would expand the space for previously marginalized voices more than they would restrict once-mainstream, now “phobic” points of view. But there’s no question that people who fall afoul of the emergent norms are more exposed to cancellation than they would have been 10 or 20 years ago.

10. If you oppose left-wing cancel culture, appeals to liberalism and free speech aren’t enough.

I said earlier that debates about cancellations are also inevitably debates about liberalism and its limits. But to defend a liberal position in these arguments you need more than just a defense of free speech in the abstract; you need to defend free speech for the sake of some important, true idea. General principles are well and good, but if you can’t champion controversial ideas on their own merits, no merely procedural argument for granting them a platform will sustain itself against a passionate, morally confident attack.

So liberals or centrists who fear the left-wing zeal for cancellation need a counterargument that doesn’t rest on right-to-be-wrong principles alone. They need to identify the places where they think the new left-wing norms aren’t merely too censorious but simply wrong, and fight the battle there, on substance as well as liberal principle.

Otherwise their battle for free speech is only likely to win them the privilege of having their own ideas canceled last of all.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook , Twitter (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram , join the Facebook political discussion group, Voting While Female .

You can follow him on Facebook or Twitter: @ DouthatNYT

Cancel Culture

A Critical Analysis

• © 2022

School of Media Arts and Studies, Ohio University, Athens, USA

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

• Provides an analytical framework for theorizing cancel culture and related phenomena in digital and non-digital spaces
• Avoids assigning cancel culture to any particular political persuasion, or assessment on the basis of political position
• Discusses cancel culture as a phenomenon arising at a particular juncture of cultural and political developments

39k Accesses

19 Citations

195 Altmetric

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this book

• Available as EPUB and PDF
• Read on any device
• Instant download
• Own it forever
• Compact, lightweight edition
• Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
• Free shipping worldwide - see info
• Durable hardcover edition

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Other ways to access

Licence this eBook for your library

Institutional subscriptions

About this book

“Cancel culture” has become one of the most charged concepts in contemporary culture and politics, but mainstream critiques from both the left and the right provide only snapshots of responses to the phenomenon. Takinga media and cultural studies perspective, this book traces the origins of cancel practices and discourses, and discusses their subsequent evolution within celebrity and fan cultures, consumer culture, and national politics in the U.S. and China. Moving beyond popular press accounts about the latest targets of cancelling or familiar free speech debates, this analysis identifies multiple lineages for both cancelling and criticisms about cancelling, underscoring the various configurations of power associated with “cancel culture” in particular cultural and political contexts. 

Similar content being viewed by others

Re-membering, (Re-) appropriation, and Polyphony: SBS Independent and White Australian Memory

Deep culture in action: resignification, synecdoche, and metanarrative in the moral panic of the salem witch trials.

Cultural Narratives, Early Occupy Movement, and the TEA Party: Revolts Against E-SCAD and SCAD

• Cancel culture
• Entertainment fandom
• Social justice
• Celebrity culture
• Media activism
• Fan studies

Table of contents (6 chapters)

Front matter, introduction, cancel culture, popular media, and fandom, cancel culture, black cultural practice, and digital activism, cancel culture, u.s. conservatism, and nation, cancel culture and digital nationalism in mainland china, back matter, authors and affiliations, about the author.

Eve Ng is Associate Professor in the School of Media Arts and Studies and the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program at Ohio University, USA. Her interdisciplinary scholarship examines LGBTQ media, digital media cultures, and constructions of national identity. She has published in numerous journals,including Communication , Culture & Critique , Development and Change ,  Feminist Media Studies , Feminist Studies ,  International Journal of Communication , Journal of Film and Video ,  Popular Communication , and Transformative Works and Culture . 

Bibliographic Information

Book Title : Cancel Culture

Book Subtitle : A Critical Analysis

Authors : Eve Ng

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97374-2

Publisher : Palgrave Macmillan Cham

eBook Packages : Literature, Cultural and Media Studies , Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)

Copyright Information : The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022

Hardcover ISBN : 978-3-030-97373-5 Published: 24 March 2022

Softcover ISBN : 978-3-030-97376-6 Published: 25 March 2023

eBook ISBN : 978-3-030-97374-2 Published: 23 March 2022

Edition Number : 1

Number of Pages : IX, 153

Topics : Cultural Studies , Media and Communication

• Publish with us

Policies and ethics

• Find a journal
• Track your research

Home — Essay Samples — Sociology — Cancel Culture — The Argument Against Cancel Culture

The Argument Against Cancel Culture

• Categories: Cancel Culture

About this sample

Words: 677 |

Published: Sep 1, 2023

Words: 677 | Page: 1 | 4 min read

Cite this Essay

Let us write you an essay from scratch

• 450+ experts on 30 subjects ready to help
• Custom essay delivered in as few as 3 hours

Get high-quality help

Verified writer

• Expert in: Sociology

+ 120 experts online

By clicking “Check Writers’ Offers”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We’ll occasionally send you promo and account related email

No need to pay just yet!

Related Essays

2 pages / 764 words

3 pages / 1484 words

5 pages / 2223 words

6 pages / 2713 words

Remember! This is just a sample.

You can get your custom paper by one of our expert writers.

121 writers online

Still can’t find what you need?

Browse our vast selection of original essay samples, each expertly formatted and styled

Related Essays on Cancel Culture

Cancel culture has become a prevalent phenomenon in today's digital age, where individuals are held accountable for their past actions or statements through public shaming and social media boycotts. While the intention behind [...]

What is cancel culture? This question has become increasingly prevalent in recent years as discussions around the phenomenon continue to captivate public discourse. Cancel culture, often referred to as call-out culture, involves [...]

For a long time, people have debated each other's opinions. Nevertheless, the internet, predominantly social media, has transformed how, when, and where such discussions occur. The amount of people who can go online and condemn [...]

“These are the myths I tell about my family and, like all myths, they are both truths and lies, simultaneous buffers of love and betrayals of trust.” (Hsu-Ming Teo 1) Love and Vertigo is a contemporary autobiographical [...]

Relatively early in their book on digital citizenship, Engin Isin and Evelyn Ruppert caution their readers: ‘We cannot simply assume that being a citizen online already means something (whether it is the ability to participate [...]

Station Eleven connects to concepts of Social Justice such as gender equality, human rights and world religion. Examples of the connection between Station Eleven and gender equality can be seen in many ways that those who [...]

Related Topics

By clicking “Send”, you agree to our Terms of service and Privacy statement . We will occasionally send you account related emails.

Where do you want us to send this sample?

By clicking “Continue”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy.

Be careful. This essay is not unique

This essay was donated by a student and is likely to have been used and submitted before

Download this Sample

Free samples may contain mistakes and not unique parts

Sorry, we could not paraphrase this essay. Our professional writers can rewrite it and get you a unique paper.

Please check your inbox.

We can write you a custom essay that will follow your exact instructions and meet the deadlines. Let's fix your grades together!

Get Your Personalized Essay in 3 Hours or Less!

We use cookies to personalyze your web-site experience. By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .

• Instructions Followed To The Letter
• Deadlines Met At Every Stage
• Unique And Plagiarism Free

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.

Share This Book

Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.

To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to  upgrade your browser .

Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link.

• We're Hiring!
• Help Center

Ng 2022 - Cancel Culture: A Critical Analysis

2022, Cancel Culture: A Critical Analysis

“Cancel culture” has become one of the most charged concepts in contemporary culture and politics, but mainstream critiques from both the left and the right provide only snapshots of responses to the phenomenon. Taking a media and cultural studies perspective, this book traces the origins of cancel practices and discourses, and discusses their subsequent evolution within celebrity and fan cultures, consumer culture, and national politics in the U.S. and China. Moving beyond popular press accounts about the latest targets of cancelling or familiar free speech debates, this analysis identifies multiple lineages for both cancelling and criticisms about cancelling, underscoring the various configurations of power associated with “cancel culture” in particular cultural and political contexts. Citation: Ng, Eve. 2022. Cancel Culture: A Critical Analysis. Palgrave Macmillan. Link: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-97374-2

Loading Preview

Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.

RELATED TOPICS

•   We're Hiring!
•   Help Center
• Find new research papers in:
• Health Sciences
• Earth Sciences
• Cognitive Science
• Mathematics
• Computer Science
• Academia ©2024

Cancel Culture Essays

Rhetoric essay analysis, cancel culture: an antihero, the comedy dilemma: free speech, cancel culture, and responsibility, the cancellation of matt damon, betty hart cancel culture, impact of cancel culture on american society, essays on cancel culture.

For those considering writing essays on the First Amendment, essays on cancel culture can be just as interesting. It’s a modern way of society being able to scold people out of their own social and/or professional circles. Social media and online channels help with this due to their overwhelming force. They are meant to prevent offenses that occur when someone makes a controversial comment or takes a controversial action.

This occurs with people with a huge public presence, from politicians to celebrities, and the cancel culture is all about the masses withdrawing their support for those specific people. This can lead to unfollowing them, boycotting them outright, and even organizing protests against them.

Where it gets interesting is that cancel culture can appear as a powerful form of social justice for the unheard masses, yet at the same time, has those masses censoring people from giving their own opinions for fear of losing out their popularity.

How to write an essay on cancel culture

Take a stand with cancel culture with whatever topic you take. Whether you think it’s a positive force or something that needs to be eliminated, make sure you explain your reasons why. Of course, while this heads towards a more opinionated essay, bring proper research and facts into the piece to help support the stance that you have taken.

You also want to look at cancel culture from its opposing perspectives as well. Representing them all fairly in your essay will show a well-thought-out approach to a difficult topic, causing serious issues in our ability to offer our opinions these days.

With evidence support writing, make sure to write engagingly. This is the time to shine with expansive language and hold the readers with storytelling techniques that will help shine your own unique light on the topic.

Some excellent topics to discuss are the following:

• Is cancel culture a form of censorship? • Is cancel culture a way to hold people accountable? • Is cancel culture a positive or negative force? • How can we avoid cancel culture? • How can we make cancel culture more fair and just? • What are the challenges of cancel culture?

If you still don’t know how to start, essay examples on this page may help you set your thoughts and start writing.

Popular Essay Topics

• American Dream
• Artificial Intelligence
• Black Lives Matter
• Bullying Essay
• Career Goals Essay
• Causes of the Civil War
• Child Abusing
• Civil Rights Movement
• Community Service
• Cultural Identity
• Cyber Bullying
• Death Penalty
• Depression Essay
• Domestic Violence
• Freedom of Speech
• Global Warming
• Gun Control
• Human Trafficking
• I Believe Essay
• Immigration
• Importance of Education
• Israel and Palestine Conflict
• Leadership Essay
• Legalizing Marijuanas
• Mental Health
• National Honor Society
• Police Brutality
• Pollution Essay
• Racism Essay
• Romeo and Juliet
• Same Sex Marriages
• Social Media
• The Great Gatsby
• The Yellow Wallpaper
• Time Management
• To Kill a Mockingbird
• Violent Video Games
• What Makes You Unique
• Why I Want to Be a Nurse
• Send us an e-mail