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The Argument Against Cancel Culture

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Cancel Culture and Other Myths

Anti-fandom as heartbreak.

what is your stand about cancel culture essay

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.

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Cancel Culture: A Persuasive Speech Essay

Cancel culture is a phenomenon of modern society that has arisen thanks to the development of social media. Social media allows the audience to instantly react to the words of users and make decisions about their moral correctness. Ng notes that cancel culture “demonstrates how content circulation via digital platforms facilitates fast, large-scale responses to acts deemed problematic” (625). However, this phenomenon does not imply a thorough, comprehensive assessment of the statements but rather hasty judgments. Thus, cancel culture is a dangerous practice for modern society, which can lead to the promotion of certain ideological views.

Cancel culture is controversial as it violates free speech. Pew Research Center notes that 58% of Americans view this phenomenon as holding people accountable for their words rather than punishing (Vogels et al.). However, diversity of opinion is the basis of any discussion and debate that has existed throughout human history. In this situation, the culture of abolition rather determines public opinion at a certain point in time by dictating a correct and false position. Thus, the pluralism of opinions is destroyed, which makes it possible to ensure the ideological balance of society.

It is also important that cancel culture causes both reputational and psychological harm to organizations and individuals. In particular, many brands have fallen victim to this phenomenon from the controversial agenda regarding the Black Lives Matter Movement (Thomas). However, this effect makes it possible to draw attention to previously marginalized groups, in this case through a kind of oppression (Ng 623). In modern society, such ideological pressure to advance a certain agenda is unacceptable. Moreover, targeted brands have suffered significant reputational and financial losses due to these incidents, which is a step beyond the social and political field.

Thus, cancel culture can be seen as strengthening the accountability of members of society for the expressed opinion. However, in this situation, it is difficult to determine who sets the boundaries of the morally correct and false. It is necessary to maintain freedom of speech to preserve the diversity of opinion, and cancel culture leads to the elevation of one agenda and the oppression of another. In a modern society that focuses on humanistic values and rights, this phenomenon is dangerous.

Works Cited

Thomas, Zoe. “What is the Cost of ‘Cancel Culture’?” BBC News , 2020, Web.

Ng, Eve. “No Grand Pronouncements Here…: Reflections on Cancel Culture and Digital Media Participation.” Television & New Media , vol. 21, no. 6, pp. 621-627.

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

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What Students Are Saying About Cancel Culture, Friendly Celebrity Battles and Finding Escape

Teenage comments in response to our recent writing prompts, and an invitation to join the ongoing conversation.

By The Learning Network

Welcome to another roundup of student comments on our writing prompts . This week we asked teenagers how they feel about cancel culture, what celebrity performer they would like to challenge to a friendly duel and how they are seeking escape in 2020.

Thank you to all those who joined the conversation, including teenagers from Norfolk, Va. ; Miami Country Day School in Florida and Valley Stream North High School in Franklin Square, N.Y.

Please note: Student comments have been lightly edited for length, but otherwise appear as they were originally submitted.

How Do You Feel About Cancel Culture?

The Style article “ Tales From the Teenage Cancel Culture ” explores what “canceling” is all about, on social media, in high school and on college campuses.

Now that the phenomenon has spread from the public realm of media figures and celebrities to their own peers, we asked students how they feel about cancel culture and whether being “called out” is an effective way to hold others accountable for their words and actions.

While a number of students spoke to the potential insight, growth and accountability that can come from calmly and gently “calling in” someone, the overwhelming majority expressed, in no uncertain terms, serious concern for cancel culture’s impact on society.

It’s Important to Learn and Grow From One’s Mistakes.

I think that cancel culture is generally an unhealthy practice. I believe that everyone should have a chance to learn and recover from the mistakes that they have made. In my opinion, it’s better to try to patiently educate someone instead of bashing and insulting them or trying to ruin their careers. No one is perfect, and everyone deserves chances to show that they can improve. However, if one is continuously repeating their mistakes and refusing to grow from them, it is problematic.

That isn’t to say that I still agree with cancel culture though. Cancel culture is often extremely toxic (specifically on the internet, not the way it is in our personal lives) and I think there are simply better and more mature ways to deal with situations as such. If a creator or influencer refuses to listen to something others have kindly given as advice to change, I would rather just ignore them then start any sort of extra conflict and let whatever platform they are on hopefully do something about it.

— Mercy V, IPoly High

Problematic actions need to be addressed in a way that gently leads people to understand their errors instead of aggressively calling people out publicly … Society is focused on acknowledging people’s faults and making them feel the torture for a mistake that was made instead of trying to work with the individual to prevent the mistake from happening again. Being “called in” instead of “called out” is a much more effective way to help members of our society grow and become better people in the future. They are able to realize a mistake was made, fix that mistake, and make the proper steps in assuring this mistake will not happen again. Calling people out only crushes their confidence and esteem which leads them to hide from the public eye, unwilling to speak out on the issue and improve themselves

— Bella S., Maury High School, Norfolk, VA

I think in certain situations cancel culture is appropriate. For example, a celebrity who has been accused of something like pedophilia is an appropriate reason to no longer support them, or “cancel” them. I also think it’s ok to cancel someone in your own head, if you don’t like who a certain person is and what they stand for, you don’t need to interact with them. However I think some people get “canceled” too quickly, and people are so quick to judge they won’t even try to hear that person’s side of the story.

— Charley Vickery, Cary High School

Calling someone out is shameful compared to calling someone in. People lose their jobs over being cancelled, without a chance to ever make amends or fix their actions, forever being locked away in a pool of hate. Imagine you want to stage an intervention. You don’t go “You have a problem, so I hate you, and you should be exiled.” You have to help them be better, because punishment isn’t good enough. If someone needs to get better, you have to shape them better.

— Jayden Nguyen, Julia R. Masterman, Philadelphia

Cancel Culture Is Inherently Problematic.

I believe that it is essential to inform someone when their behavior has been insulting or disparaging, but Cancel Culture has brought this to an unnecessary extreme. Cancel Culture originates often from good intentions, but instead of explaining how a person’s behavior has been harmful to others and allowing them the opportunity to learn from their mistakes, it ostracizes a person and can leave them with doubts and poor self esteem.

— Sam R, FL

Cancel culture often ends up being personally attacked instead of constructively criticizing the person. Most of the time when someone gets canceled, doesn’t even talk to them first before canceling them. Even in one of the stories in the article about the girl being canceled. None of her friends told her about why they canceled her, they just cut her out of her life. Cancel culture can also emotionally damage someone being cancelled. They often feel helpless and become depressed … An easy solution to fix cancel culture is to personally message someone if something is bothering you about them. Instead of just cutting that person out of your life.

— Aaron D., IPoly High

Cancel culture, in our society today, has infested every bit of our lives. People are denounced and ridiculed for their actions years ago, or things they completely regret doing. Calling people out, and publicly shaming them is not the way, but it should be used as a time for education and reflection. By showing how they’re actions are wrong, they can change to be a better person. When it comes to people you personally know, cancel culture is petty and ignorant. Just because you dislike someone, doesn’t mean you have to ruin their life and turn everyone against them. Give them an opportunity to reconcile, and teach them the error of their ways. As for celebrities, just because of some horrendous and heinous acts, doesn’t mean we have to rip all their good contributions to society too. Just because Michael Jackson did terrible things, doesn’t mean he’s not the king of pop and we can’t enjoy his music. It’s like saying just because the founding fathers owned slaves, we can’t live and thrive in America. I think Pete Davidson said it best when he said “acting like these people never existed is not the solution” and later said that “every time you watch a movie or listen to a song by a serial predator, donate a dollar to a charity that helps sexual assault. I’ve donated $142, and that’s from the ignition remix alone.”

— Gavin Swartz, Glenbard West, Glen Ellyn, IL

I think that cancel culture is something that is becoming too common. Of course, I know that when people do or say something wrong, we should warn them and tell them that it’s wrong … Cancelling is right when we try and make people acknowledge what they’ve done wrong, but everything has a limit.

— Clara Almeida, Escola Americana Do Recife, Brazil

Cancel Culture Is Ineffective.

Canceling someone for a particular reason merely buries an issue without facing it … We stopped having discussions and open dialogues, to instead shut people down and “banish” them. We shut people down when we sense what is considered “immoral behavior,” but in fact, tearing someone down and getting “rid” of them is what should be regarded as immoral. If an individual is, in fact, culpable of their accusation, it is their responsibility to grow as a person and come to terms with what they have done with a sincere apology. “Cancel culture” has created censorship on the internet insofar as not being able to have meaningful debates or conversations without the fear of being “wrong.”

— Chloe B, Miami Country Day School, Florida

Cancel culture is ridiculous and ineffective. A celebrity can lose everything they worked for solely because of a joke they tweeted over a decade ago that got resurfaced. Cancel culture teaches us that no matter how small the statement may be, you will never be forgiven and your life will be ruined if you offend somebody. I’m not saying that people should be blatantly offensive to certain groups, but most of the time people being canceled are simply making jokes. We can’t grow as a society if we shut down people that have different political views or canceling people over a joke.

— Henry King, Glen Ellyn, IL

Cancel Culture Is a Plague.

Cancel culture. A horrible crime to commit to someone on the internet. Unapologetic. Unforgiving. Cruel. Forming an army against someone for something they said or did 10 years ago can only be described by those words. People need to take people for who they are now and what they stand for now. Think about yourself. Think how differently you thought just 5 years ago. Some of the things you said or did you laugh for cringe to now. We need to accept apologies and if the person understand what they did wrong they should forgiven not the product of a witch hunt by millions of Twitter users calling them less than human for holding a controversial opinion or saying something not politically correct 10 years ago. I don’t care who you are nobody is perfect. Everyone has said insensitive things. We should appreciate their growth as a person instead of bringing them down for past wrongs.

— Nate, Illinois

I think that cancel culture is primitive and closed-minded. When I think of cancel culture, I can’t help but think of old religious groups who would execute members of other religions. Its such a poor way to handle things and I don’t understand how or why it is so widely used. It creates a lack of respect or understanding of other peoples opinions. In cancel culture there is only one opinion, the opinion of the masses. Cancel culture is definitely one of the many reasons our generation is yet to amount to anything major. It is truly saddening that there are so many people in the world that are so closed-minded that a mistake or even a differing opinion is unfathomable and must be dealt with by destroying that person’s reputation.

— Javier Aristy, Hoggard High School, Wilmington NC

I Know What It’s Like to Cancel or Be Canceled.

I have already canceled a classmate. The decision that led me to cancel my classmate is because I thought this person was toxic, and this person liked to turn people against others. I still believe that I made the right decision by canceling my classmate.

Yes, I have already been canceled by a friend. My friend was upset by something that I said. Still, I did not know that my friend would be upset by what I said, so I got canceled, then it passed a week, and I did not understand why my friend was not talking to me, then I ask her why, and she told me why and I explained myself to her, and then we were okay and friends again. When a person is called out, I think they need to take responsibility for their action as much as they are embarrassed. I believe that you should call the person to talk in private.

Cancel culture is a good thing from my perspective you get to cancel a person that does no good to you, but some people don’t know how to use that, and they have gone too far using cancel culture in the wrong way. Everything has its positive and negative sides.

— Bianca N, Escola Americana do Recife, Brazil

I have cancelled my friend before. He did so many wrong things such as being racist, made my self-worth plummet, and also was a very manipulative person … It’s obvious as to why I had to “cancel” my friend, he was a very bad influence, a horrible person, and made everyone paranoid with his gaslighting. I do think this was the right choice because he was just a toxic person. Having him in my life would only degrade it and hurt me more, so in order to heal I had to cut him out of my life by cancelling him.

— Luis M, IPoly High

Personally I’ve “cancelled” many celebrities when they express themselves in a way that is racist and discriminatory because I don’t want to give racism and discrimination the ability to thrive … If a person ever gets cancelled I believe they should take the steps they need to take in order to get forgiveness for what they have done and to showcase that they aren’t a person who likes to hurt people in any way. Regardless of what you said if you ever get cancelled my best advice is to apologize and open your eyes to view what you said from a different perspective.

— Carlos Felix-Crespo, Philadelphia, PA

Which Celebrity Performer Would You Like to Challenge to a Friendly Battle?

What famous person would you take on in a test of skills, talent or artistry? It’s a question we raised in the Student Opinion prompt “ Which Celebrity Performer Would You Like to Challenge to a Friendly Battle? ” in response to an epic drum battle between the Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl and the 10-year-old prodigy Nandi Bushell that has gone viral.

Students’ responses covered everything from sports prowess and dance to baking and even eating corn on the cob.

Taking the Physical Challenge

If I could challenge anyone I desired to be like, it would definitely be Raymond “The Real Deal” Daniels, professional MMA Fighter. Currently, I already train with him and at his studio, but I haven’t really gotten the chance to fight with him. Obviously, no matter the circumstances, I would lose … like by a lot. I always try to do his flashy kicks, and even though I won’t perform those if I challenge him, being there in the moment might give me an understanding on how to accomplish one of his moves. I could also just watch one of his fights on YouTube, but for some reason, I rather risk having bruises than just sit there.

— Essien Gagnon, LA

If I could pick anyone to have a friendly one on one with, it would be my favorite golfer, Jordan Spieth, to a putt-off on the golf course. Although he has fallen off recently, he’s still an amazing golfer and the world’s best when it comes to putting. Personally, I pride myself on my putting and he’s my favorite athlete ever. I just think we would have a great time.

— Ryder Comet, HHHS

If I could challenge any celebrity in the world I would choose Cory Seger. First of all I would choose him because he is one of my favorite baseball players. It would be great just to meet him let alone be able to play a game with him. I would challenge him to one game he would for sure beat me but at least I would get to play with him. I would do this because it would teach me a lot. He would teach me a lot from one game.

— Christine B, IPoly High

If I could challenge anyone in the world to do anything, I would challenge Mookie Betts to a home run derby. Mookie Betts is one of the best if not the best MLB player. Not only would I get a chance to see what Mookie does in order to be the best, I would also get tips on my hitting and how to stay positive when you get into a slump.

— Nathan, LA

Throwing Down the Gauntlet in Music

If I were to challenge any celebrity in the world, I would challenge Lalisa Manoban, better known as Lisa from Blackpink to an epic dance-off. I would want to challenge her to a dance-off because I have always emulated K-pop dances in my free time and one of my favorite groups to take inspiration from is Blackpink. I would specifically do a dance-off with Lisa because she is known as one of the best female K-pop dancers both among fans and the entertainment industry. Although I would most definitely lose the dance-off, since she is undefeatable when it comes to dancing, I always love a new challenge.

— Grace Jeon, LA

First things first, we all have to agree that Nandi Bushell is amazing. She is so inspirational and not afraid to go after what she wants. If I ever have to face a celebrity, I would definitely choose Yiruma. I choose Yiruma because I love his piano pieces. It’s also because I absolutely love the piano, and I think it’s such an amazing instrument. I admire Yiruma, and I think his piano pieces are so beautiful.

I would like to challenge Steve Reich to a composition competition. It would show how he composes and the precautions he takes. It would be very interesting to see how he compares to other composers.

Sharing an Interest — and a Challenge

I would challenge the car trio (Jeremy Clarkson, James May, and Richard Hammond) to a cheap car challenge. If you are not familiar with the idea of a cheap car challenge, it’s really simple. You are given a budget between $500-$3000, and have various tasks to complete with them. I would have the budget set at $2000, you need anything with 4WD or AWD, and I would set the location at Baja Mexico. For the series of challenges would start easy. You start by showing up to Entrada Gigantas Farm off road racetrack. From there, you would see who has the fastest car. The next challenge would be driving to Ensenada Mexico. There you would be giving $5000 to set your car up for the Baja 800. Once done, you will race the Baja 1000. If you finish, then you have to drive from La Paz, you have $1000 to destroy your car as creatively as possible. If you don’t want to destroy your car, something that you personally value will be destroyed (if you think that this is harsh, you definitely have never watched Top Gear). The winner will get $5000.

— John Moore, NC

When considering a celebrity I would like to challenge in a particular event, one major factor is what do I have talent in? Eating Corn on the cob. I would challenge my favorite actor of all time “Marky” Mark Wahlberg into a corn on the cob eating challenge. The contest would be held in Wahlberg’s home city of Boston. Some people might wonder why I wouldn’t choose my home city of Chicago, but Mark would be the underdog in this competition so he would need the home field advantage

— Andrew Moody. Glenbard West High School

What Is This Image Saying?

The Picture Prompt “ Off The Grid ” evoked strong emotions from students. In it, many saw our dependence on technology in the era of Covid-19 and the isolated work environment the pandemic has created. Others felt the image depicted our society’s problem with work-life balance and our subsequent disconnect from the natural environment around us.

The Challenge of Today’s Work Environment

I think this image depicts how many of us are feeling about working at home and online school, and how it seems we can’t get away from our devices, because we especially need them to communicate and participate in our communities. We need escape from the stress of work, school, and the chaos of current events, such as politics and the COVID pandemic. Our current situation gives the illusion that we have all the time in the world to go on vacation and do fun things since we are working remotely. In reality, not many places are open to the public. They’re are so many strict COVID violations we must follow to keep us and others safe.

— Terner Jenkins, Maryland

As I was really trying to understand the image’s message I realized that the beach doesn’t represent an actual beach, but instead an inadequate working environment. Like most kids I would find it very hard to sit down and turn in good quality assignments while sitting on a beach. My mind would wander and I would want to do simply anything over work. While sitting at my desk in my room day after day that’s simply how I feel. Not going into school has made me feel like school is a lot more optional then it should be. I might wake up one morning and say, “you know what, I don’t feel like getting up yet.” I turn back over and sleep through a zoom call. Not my brightest moment but of course everyone has those days.

— Kendra McNutt, John T Hoggard High School

Missing Human Interaction

I feel like since we sit behind computer screens and phone screens so much, we miss out on many things because of how much we are glued to them. However, with Covid-19 and working from home, it has made us have to stay behind a computer screen even more and stay confined to our homes. By staying behind the computer and working from home, we lose physical interactions with humans and I think that is what this picture is saying. Since we work from home and use video calling services such as Zoom, we miss those kinds of interactions and in the picture, you can see a person escaping that and another person in front of them doing the same. They are leaving what we are used to and for many of us our new “normal” right now. I wish I could do the same and I can definitely relate because I have school all day and have to use my computer for homework and to attend school. I think that this message is a good one and I agree with it because sometimes we need to escape and just get away from it all.

— DaShaun Smith, Philadelphia, PA

Need a Break From Technology

This image is trying to demonstrate the importance in living in the moment, off of work and your electronic devices. We need to get away from our daily lives and all the technology that’s brought with it and pay attention to the world around you and how there’s so much out there besides a screen. Technology follows us everywhere we go and we don’t even realize it, and its pretty sad given how much of our surroundings we take for granted.

— Karime Ribeiro, Valley Stream North High School

The image itself shows a beautiful sunset on a beach with all these hot air balloons. But smack in the middle, there is a messy desk with piles of work. It signifies how there are great sceneries out in the world for us to explore but we oftentimes trapped ourselves in our computer and work. This relates to our society especially now we are all at home and have more freedom than before but are stuck to the computer. I can relate to this personally because in the past few weeks, months, and even years, when my parents ask me to go out with them I would decline due to the amount of work I have. However, it is not only harmful to me but harmful to my family as well. In the image, we can see that no one is at the desk and there is someone slipping away from the image showing that someone is running away from the toxic work to enjoy the simple pleasure of life. I feel this message is very important and we should all take part in the move to enjoy ourselves.

— Bonnie Lu, CA

I think the message of the image is trying to convey that even though we feel like we are in our safe place, there will always be work/news coverage from the media that is bad, and we need to take a rest out of the picture. This relates to society or current events because you’re going to find out the news of a topic when you are trying to relax, so there is no escape around it. I can relate to this personally because when I try to take a break from work/social media (where I get my news), there is always someone I overhear or tells me that something went wrong when I just don’t want to think about anything negative.

— Sebastian Perez, Philadelphia, PA

Work-Life Balance

In the image, the laptop screen shows an exclamation mark which can illustrate that it is overloaded and cannot be used anymore. Similarly, when people are overworked too much, they can become “overloaded” and stressed out that they aren’t able to “function” properly. Also, although the sunset is providing some light, there’s a lamp on top of the desk possibly showing that the person was so focused on his work, that he didn’t even realize that a lamp was unnecessary. As time passes, it can be inferred that the person has been overworked and is dying to escape from his workload since he tries to escape from the image, as you can see at the bottom right. Furthermore, it seems that he is dressed for the beach based on his flip flops and green shirt possibly indicating that he wants to enjoy the beautiful beach now and relax. Through this illustration, I believe the creator is trying to send a message to people who overwork themselves: you don’t need to push yourself too hard. Sometimes, it’s okay to relax.

— Merry, Glenbard West High School, IL

A more simplistic photo would show an escape from the computer alone, and our hero advancing into the easy atmosphere of the sunset. What it offers instead is a much complex photo, of the man escaping the scene altogether. I take the direct juxtaposition of the desk and the beach as a symbol of a ruined work-life balance and the internet’s enabling a longer arm to all bosses so that they may reach you whenever they like, regardless of whether you’re on the clock or not. This amalgamation prevents you from enjoying yourself. Alternatively, it’s a commentary on the “self-care industry”, where companies will have you buy your peace through expensive and unnecessary products. It prevents any true introspection or real self care, because it doesn’t require you actually think about your life. And yet this is becoming the norm when we think of what self care entails. We see our hero rejecting the entire system as he makes his escape from the picture, in search of true spiritual enlightenment that cannot be bought or sold.

— dell, philadelphia

Impossible to Truly Get Off the Grid

In today’s day and age, considering oneself “off the grid” requires far more effort than in previous decades. You’d like to be off the grid, but you still have nine social media accounts lurking in the back of your mind, promotional emails flooding your inbox with consistent reminders of other commitments. Sure, it’s easy to remove oneself from a physical environment that causes stress, whether this means work or school or one’s home life. But fully removing oneself from the situation is impossible; calls will still come through, deadlines won’t change, and people can contact each other on various platforms. Going off the grid is borderline impossible, and finding an escape from this reality can be just as difficult.

— Lexi Kud, Glenbard West High School

A Need to Reconnect to the Natural World

Technology has consumed the lives of many through the use of entertaining streaming tools or communication apps designed to attract any person. Unbeknownst to the users, they in turn dissociate with the world around them — as this illustration depicts, technology is the focal point in our priorities while ignoring the bliss of the world around us. In other words, we lose touch with reality as soon as we begin to ignore the world around us. Decades ago, people lived within their environment, based their lives off of it, now, we create fictitious realities for ourselves, separating us from living. Envy in nature’s beauty. Cherish the world around you. Ask yourself, am I living, or am I alive?

— Ryan Clark, Glenbard West HS, Glen Ellyn, IL

An illustration of a laptop computer with a hand and a courtroom gavel coming out of its screen.

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The second wave of “cancel culture”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conservatives are using fear of cancel culture as a cudgel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Very few “canceled” public figures suffer significant career setbacks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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What We Talk About When We Talk About 'Cancel Culture'

Is it a useful tool for social justice or a form of censorship? Either way (or neither way) the debate over cancel culture is raging. ROBYN BECK/ROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

Is it a useful tool for social justice or a form of censorship? Either way (or neither way) the debate over cancel culture is raging.

By now, if you're a person who spends any time at all on the internet, you know the routine.

A person or brand does something considered offensive or problematic. Social media lights up, when posts are written and shared about it. The incident snowballs. The firestorm puts pressure on that person or organization until that entity is effectively "canceled."

That's " cancel culture " in a nutshell. But there's a large debate about the role it has been playing in our society — whether it goes too far, whether it's effective for social change and whether it even exists .

Harper's recently published a letter that touched on "cancel culture" and freedom of speech titled, " A Letter on Justice and Open Debate. " Subsequently, a response was published in The Objective newsletter titled, " A More Specific Letter on Justice and Open Debate. "

Thomas Chatterton Williams , co-author of the Harper's letter, Gabe Schneider , co-author of The Objective response and Faithe Day , a post-doctoral fellow in data curation and African American studies at Purdue University, joined us to talk about what we talk about when we talk about cancel culture.

Like what you hear? Find more of our programs online .

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Regions & Countries

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.

In September 2020, 44% of Americans had heard at least a fair amount about the phrase 'cancel culture'

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.

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.

Conservative Republicans less likely than other partisan, ideological groups to describe 'cancel culture' as actions taken to hold others accountable

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?

Partisans differ over whether calling out others on social media for potentially offensive content represents accountability or 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.

Americans explain why they think calling out others on social media for potentially offensive posts is either holding people accountable or unjustly punishing them

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.

In this analysis, “familiar with” or “aware of” the phrase cancel culture mean “have heard at least a fair amount about the phrase cancel culture.” ↩
Quotations in this essay may have been lightly edited for grammar, spelling and clarity. ↩

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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 .

What is Cancel Culture?

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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!)

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The Mental Health Effects of Cancel Culture

Lindsey Toler, MPH, is a public health professional with over a decade of experience writing and editing health and science communications.

Akeem Marsh, MD, is a board-certified child, adolescent, and adult psychiatrist who has dedicated his career to working with medically underserved communities.

Wildpixel / Getty Images

Reasons for Canceling

Cancel culture examples.

Positive Impacts
Mental Health Effects
Protect Yourself

Can You Avoid Being Canceled?

What is cancel culture.

Cancel culture is a form of boycott. It is the removal or "canceling" of a person, organization, product, brand, or anything else due to an issue that a community or group disapproves of or finds offensive.

One definition of cancel culture is "the popular practice of withdrawing support for...public figures and companies after they have done or said something considered objectionable or offensive." This canceling is often "performed on social media in the form of group shaming .”

In short, to be canceled means that a person or group decides to stop supporting someone or something based on a transgression that is either actual or perceived.

Call-Out Culture vs. Cancel Culture

These terms are often used interchangeably, but there is a difference. Call-out culture is about calling attention to someone's wrongdoing and giving them a chance to learn from and correct the issue. Cancel culture does not give this opportunity and, instead, immediately labels them as bad .

Origin of Cancel Culture

Although canceling is often used in response to sexist behavior , the term itself appears to originate from sexist humor. One of the earliest references came from the 1991 film New Jack City. Nino Brown (played by Wesley Snipes), referring to a girlfriend, mercilessly states, “Cancel that [expletive]. I’ll buy another one.”

The term gained traction in 2014 thanks to an episode of VH1's reality show Love and Hip-Hop: New York . In this episode, music executive and record producer Cisco Rosado ended an argument with his girlfriend by saying, "You're canceled.”

In earlier days, the word "cancel" was often used on social media as a way for a person who was part of the Black LGBTQ+ community to show disapproval of another person's actions. It wasn’t until later that canceling someone involved boycotting them professionally.

A 2020 survey conducted by Pew Research Center highlights the controversy surrounding cancel culture. While 38% of people say that calling someone out on social media punishes those who don't deserve it, 58% feel that it helps hold people accountable for their actions.

Some of the top reasons cited for canceling include:

To serve as a teaching moment
To get the person to consider the consequences of their statements
To expose racism or sexism
To get people to think before they speak
To hold someone accountable for their statements or behaviors

Some examples of cancel culture include:

J.K. Rowling , the author of Harry Potter , was canceled after making a comment on Twitter in June of 2020 that offended some members of the transgender community . The tweet in question was retweeted over 95,000 times and drew more than 46,000 comments.
Mike Lindell , the CEO of MyPillow, was canceled in 2021 after supporting the claims of voter fraud against former President Donald Trump. At least two banks joined in on the canceling in 2022 after phone call recordings were subpoenaed by the January 6 House select committee, ultimately telling Lindell to "leave their bank" as he was a "reputation risk."
Chrissy Teigen , a model and bestselling cookbook author, was also canceled in 2021 after several people exposed her for sending " mean tweets ," ultimately causing Teigen to step away from her cleaning supplies company and be replaced by Netflix in the second season of "Never Have I Ever."

Positive Impact of Cancel Culture

Cancel culture can help combat wrongdoings and address inequalities . In 2016, for example, many members of the film community boycotted the Oscars because of the lack of diversity among nominees. This helped promote social change and, in 2019, the Oscars set a record for the most nominations for Black directors ever.

A community that unites for a common cause can be empowering. It can also make people think twice before behaving inappropriately or posting potentially offensive thoughts and opinions.

Mental Health Effects of Cancel Culture

There are also negative effects of cancel culture, some of which are related to mental health. The impact of cancel culture on mental health depends on whether you are the one being canceled, the canceler, or a bystander.

Effects on the Canceled

Unfortunately, canceling often turns into bullying . Like bullying, if you've been canceled, you may feel ostracized, socially isolated, and lonely. And research shows that loneliness is associated with higher anxiety, depression, and suicide rates.

If you are canceled, it can also feel as if everyone is giving up on you before you've even had the chance to apologize (let alone change your behavior). Instead of creating a dialogue to help you understand how your actions hurt others, the cancelers shut off all communication, essentially robbing you of the opportunity to learn and grow from your mistakes .

To grow and become a better person, it's important to realize you've made a mistake, attempt to fix that mistake, and then take the proper steps to ensure that you don't make the same mistake again .

Effects on the Canceler

You have the right to set your own boundaries and to decide what uplifts and what offends you. You also have the right to decide to whom and what you give your attention, money, and support.

But canceling the offending person (or brand) doesn't always cause them to change their beliefs or lead to lasting change. It can even make them dig in their heels in an effort to defend their ego and reputation.

In some cases, canceling has the opposite effect of what was desired. One example is the docuseries "Surviving R. Kelly ." While this TV series prompted many to push for a sex crimes conviction against the musician, it also created a 126% increase in on-demand streams of Kelly's music the day after the premiere.

Effects on the Bystander

Cancel culture doesn’t just affect the canceled and the cancelers. It can also wreak havoc on onlookers’ mental health.

After seeing so many people being canceled, some bystanders are plagued with fear. They become overwhelmed with anxiety that people will turn on them if they fully express themselves. This can cause them to keep their thoughts bottled up instead of talking about and working through their opinions and emotions.

Bystanders might also worry that others will find something in their pasts to use against them. Or they may fear that every word they say or write is going to be examined under a microscope and construed as offensive, even if it wasn't meant to be.

So, instead of saying how they feel about an event or situation, bystanders may choose to remain silent. This can lead them to be weighed down with guilt long after the event or situation has passed—guilt for not standing up for someone else when they had the chance.

The idea that cancel culture has caused some people to fall silent or not feel comfortable sharing what is on their minds has caused some to debate whether it presents an issue with the right to free speech.

How to Protect Your Mental Health

Though you can't control how others behave, you can control your own behavior (as well as how you respond to negativity). Here are some actions you can take to help protect your mental health with regard to cancel culture:

Avoid posting when your emotions are heightened . Try not to post when you're feeling overly emotional. If someone says or does something that pushes your buttons, don't rush to your keyboard. Instead, take a few deep breaths and give yourself time to calm down . While you may forget what you said or wrote a day, week, or month from now, the internet never forgets.
Have others review your post first . Sometimes it's hard to recognize when our own words may come across as offensive or aggressive. Having someone else review your posts first can help bring any potential issues to your attention. This gives you the opportunity to avoid sharing thoughts or opinions that could inadvertently hurt someone else.
If you were wrong, apologize . If you were canceled for saying or doing something and now feel bad about it, apologize. But before you do, give yourself time to craft a genuine, well-thought-out response (this also gives time for the attention to die down). Then, when you're ready, share your apology. It might not be accepted by everyone. But if it's from the heart, some people will recognize this and allow it to soften their views of you—or at least reduce their desire to make you their top public enemy.
Try to see the other side . If someone speaks out against you, your first reaction may be to dig in and stand your ground. However, you may get further by trying to truly understand how your words or actions may have hurt or offended someone else. Gaining this understanding can bridge the communication gap. It can also help keep you from making the same mistake again.
Spend less time online . It's okay to take a break from social media . Unplugging every now and then may help improve your mental health. One study found that cutting back on social media use decreases loneliness and depression .
Talk to someone . If you're experiencing cancel culture firsthand and are not sure how to recover, consider reaching out to someone you trust, such as a family member or close friend. If you're not comfortable talking to someone you know, you can also seek professional help . Having someone to confide in can make a huge difference in the way you feel.

Consider that everyone has different backgrounds, experiences, and beliefs. Although yours have caused you to view the world one way, not everyone has that same view. Being aware of this (and open-minded ) can help keep you from saying or doing something that makes you a target.

It's also helpful to remember that you don't have to intend to be offensive in order to offend. Perception becomes reality, so if someone perceives your words or actions as offensive, it doesn't matter what you intended. The damage is done.

So, instead of trying to convince others that you didn't mean to offend them, recognize that they are offended and work to find ways to move forward. Learn from the experience and use it to help you become a stronger, more caring, and empathetic person.

A Word From Verywell

Some aspects of cancel culture can be useful in holding people and organizations accountable for bad behavior. On the flip side, it can take bullying to a new level, damaging the mental well-being of everyone involved.

The key to overcoming any sort of ostracism or rejection is to not allow the things that are said or done to define who you are as a person. And don't be afraid to reach out for help. Having someone in your corner can help you feel more connected and less alone.

Dictionary.com. Cancel culture: What does cancel culture mean?

Romano A. Why we can’t stop fighting about cancel culture . Vox .

Clark MD. DRAG THEM: A brief etymology of so-called “cancel culture" . Communic Public . 2020;5(3-4):88-92. doi:10.1177/2057047320961562

Vogels E, Anderson M, Porteus M, et al. Americans and 'cancel culture': Where some see calls for accountability, others see censorship, punishment . Pew Research Center.

Camero K. What is 'cancel culture'? J.K. Rowling controversy leaves writers, scholars debating . Miami Herald .

Teh C, Lahut J. MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell says he's 'disgusted' with 2 banks he claims are cutting ties with him over 'cancel culture' after his phone records were subpoenaed by the January 6 committee . Yahoo! News .

Ali R. 'There is no winning': Chrissy Teigen opens up about being in the 'cancel club' . USA Today .

Collins KA. The 2019 Oscar nominations are a long-overdue net win for black filmmakers . Vanity Fair .

Beutel ME, Klein EM, Brähler E, et al. Loneliness in the general population: prevalence, determinants and relations to mental health . BMC Psychiatry . 2017;17(1):97. doi:10.1186/s12888-017-1262-x

Dudenhoefer N. Is cancel culture effective? . University of Central Florida.

University of Pennsylvania. Free speech advocate discusses growing talk of 'cancel culture' . Penn Today .

Hunt MG, Marx R, Lipson C, Young J. No more FOMO: Limiting social media decreases loneliness and depression . J Soc Clin Psychol . 2018;37(10):751-768. doi:10.1521/jscp.2018.37.10.751

By Lindsey Toler Lindsey Toler, MPH, is a public health professional with over a decade of experience writing and editing health and science communications.

What Is Cancel Culture and What Does It Mean in 2024?

What is cancel culture.

Cancel culture: noun the attitudes within a community which call for or bring about the withdrawal of support from a public figure, such as cancellation of an acting role, a ban on playing an artist's music, removal from social media, etc., usually in response to an accusation of a socially unacceptable action or comment.

What Is Intersectionality? A Complete Breakdown

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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.

I love this #taylorswiftisoverparty....been at this party since 1989....most annoying and ridiculous singer in the biz....ok! Kill her!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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COMMENTS

The Argument Against Cancel Culture: [Essay Example], 677 words
The Argument Against Cancel Culture. Against cancel culture is a viewpoint that challenges the prevalent trend of public shaming, ostracism, and punitive actions in response to perceived wrongdoings or controversial statements. While the intention behind cancel culture is often to hold individuals accountable for their actions, it has raised ...
Cancel Culture: The Adverse Impacts
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.
Kathryn Lofton: "Cancel Culture and Other Myths"
In a 2020 essay addressing cancel culture, Ligaya Mishan writes, ... 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.
Why we can't stop fighting about cancel culture
By Aja Romano @ajaromano Updated Aug 25, 2020, 12:03pm EDT. Aja Romano writes about pop culture, media, and ethics. Before joining Vox in 2016, they were a staff reporter at the Daily Dot. A 2019 ...
Opinion
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 ...
How Do You Feel About Cancel Culture?
Nov. 13, 2020. Students in U.S. high schools can get free digital access to The New York Times until Sept. 1, 2021. When you hear the terms "canceled" or "cancel culture," what comes to ...
Cancel Culture: A Persuasive Speech
Cancel culture is a phenomenon of modern society that has arisen thanks to the development of social media. Social media allows the audience to instantly react to the words of users and make decisions about their moral correctness. Ng notes that cancel culture "demonstrates how content circulation via digital platforms facilitates fast, large ...
What Students Are Saying About Cancel Culture, Friendly Celebrity
The Style article "Tales From the Teenage Cancel Culture" explores what "canceling" is all about, on social media, in high school and on college campuses. Now that the phenomenon has ...
What is cancel culture? How the concept has evolved to mean very
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
PDF Cancel Culture: Why It Is Necessary for the Sake of Social Justice
This essay argues that cancel - culture plays important role s in both raising awareness about social injustice and promoting social change. To support this argument, this essay will look at three reasons why cancel culture makes an important contribution to society: Firstly, cancel culture seeks to address the deep inequalities ...
What We Talk About When We Talk About 'Cancel Culture'
Some say "cancel culture" is an attack on free speech by the so-called "woke." Others believe it's an overdue move to call out powerful people and companies for views and policies that oppress the ...
Americans and 'Cancel Culture': Where Some See Calls for Accountability
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. ... Given that cancel culture can mean different things to different people, the survey ...
What Is Cancel Culture? Origin, Impact, & Controversy
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 ...
The Mental Health Effects of Cancel Culture
Positive Impact of Cancel Culture. Cancel culture can help combat wrongdoings and address inequalities. In 2016, for example, many members of the film community boycotted the Oscars because of the lack of diversity among nominees. This helped promote social change and, in 2019, the Oscars set a record for the most nominations for Black ...
Cancel Culture: What Is It, Examples, When Did It Start & More
noun the attitudes within a community which call for or bring about the withdrawal of support from a public figure, such as cancellation of an acting role, a ban on playing an artist's music ...
What Is Cancel Culture, and Does It Change Things for the Better?
Learning objectives: Define cancel culture and identify the benefits, drawbacks, and impacts of calling people out online. Practice considering all dimensions of a conflict in order to determine the most effective tool or approach for addressing it. Build support of others through positive strategies for conflict resolution, such as "calling in."
Resisting Cancel Culture: Promoting Dialogue, Debate, and Free Speech
Cancel culture organizes or manipulates the social or media environment to isolate, intimidate, deplatform, or demoralize political or social adversaries. It is inherently hostile to viewpoint diversity and intellectual pluralism. Criticism comes from the world of truth-seeking, cancel culture from the world of propaganda and information warfare.
4.3.2 #canceled (research essay)
4.3.2 #canceled (research essay) 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 ...
What is Cancel Culture Free Essay Example
Cancel culture. It means 'canceling' or no longer supporting people—often celebrities—media or other things that are considered problematic. This cancel culture essay describes how it is becoming increasingly popular because our current society is moving to be more politically correct and inclusive. With the rise of social media also ...