cancel culture essay intro

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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Cancel Culture: A Persuasive Speech Essay

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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.

• Margaret Fuller: The Real Mother Nature
• The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)
• Race Matters, Cancel Culture, and “Boys Go to Jupiter”
• Relations in Bone by Fae M. Ng and Rice by Su Tong
• Why Cancel Culture Suppresses People
• Discussion of Abolitionist Movement
• The Concepts of Freedom and the Great Depression
• Affirmative Action and Preferential Hiring
• Second Demographic Transition: Causes and Effects
• Areas That Tied to Lifespan Development
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2022, November 22). Cancel Culture: A Persuasive Speech. https://ivypanda.com/essays/cancel-culture-a-persuasive-speech/

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Bibliography

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who’s heard of ‘cancel culture’?

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

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

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

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

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

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

How do Americans define ‘cancel culture’?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are people rushing to judge or trying to be helpful?

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

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

Is calling out others on social media productive behavior?

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

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

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

What’s the agenda behind calling out others online?

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

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

Should people speak up if they are offended?

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

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

Acknowledgments – Appendix – Methodology – Topline

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

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

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Home — Essay Samples — Sociology — Cancel Culture — Understanding “Cancel Culture”: Exploring its Origins, Impact

Understanding "Cancel Culture": Exploring Its Origins, Impact

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Cancel Culture and Other Myths

Anti-fandom as heartbreak.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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34 Cancel Cancel Culture

First, I want to thank everyone who has helped me get to a point where I can formulate coherent arguments pertaining to topics that I am passionate about. Most importantly, I want to thank those who have instilled in me a passion to defend fleeting freedoms…

Keywords: Canceling, Silencing, Morality, Values, Conversation

How do you choose what to say and what not to say? Anyone who communicates with others and has individual agency has grappled with this question before due to the fact that what you choose to say has consequences. On an interpersonal level, you may choose not to say something because you know that the person listening to you would not react positively to what you might choose to say. On this scale, the arbiter of whether or not you should say something is a combination of your own perception and that of the individual you are communicating with because, through conversation, you can immediately address the implications of your communication. For instance, if you’re talking to your friend and you make a comment generalizing an aspect of your friend’s identity, your friend can quickly correct you and suggest how to make your claim in a manner more considerate to his or her identity. Individual empowerment in the realm of mass communication due to large scale social media platforms like Instagram and Twitter has changed the way in which people communicate and hence, how people choose what to say and what not to say. The foremost complication that his novel method of communication presents is that there is no true force or institution that decides the implications of what people say on these platforms given that they reach so many different people who likely have countless different reactions. This predicament has introduced a new concept called “cancel culture” which is essentially a “solution” to the lack of an arbiter on these platforms. I argue that this “solution” has incredibly destructive effects on society because it inherently removes a foundational element of rhetoric and persuasion itself and what I believe the solution to the lack of an arbiter should be: conversation. This chapter will aim at examining the widely felt effects cancel culture has had on public discourse, on an individual and group level, and emphasize the importance of conversation as the true remedy to disagreement.

Cancel Culture, variations of which include “to cancel” “to be canceled” and “canceling” is a digital phenomenon which has come to the public spotlight only recently due to a tense political climate facilitated by social media. Some examples from the seemingly endlessly long list of recently canceled phenomena and individuals include Mike Lindell, J.K. Rowling, Goya Foods, and even Presidents Washington, Lincoln and, Jefferson (Sadler). In my primary source “DRAG THEM: A brief etymology of so-called “cancel culture,”” being canceled is defined in simpler terms by Jonah Engel Bromwich, a New York Times writer, as a “total disinvestment in something (anything)” (Clark 88). He takes the definition one step further to note a crucial point which is that canceling has to do with individual agency. It’s an active choice “to withdraw one’s attention from someone or something whose values, (in)action, or speech are so offensive, one no longer wishes to grace them with their presence, time, and money” (88). Thus, the act of canceling can be considered a “discursive accountability praxis” that is engaged when a group of people disagree with or are offended by communication or any other form of media released into the public sphere (88). The part of Clark’s explanation of Cancel Culture that sticks out to me most, and that I think has the most destructive implications, is that the party that is being offended or that disagrees with whatever is being released into the public sphere is the unequivocal arbiter of the person or entity who released it. Citing Meraz & Papacharissi, 2013, she calls this act “networked framing” which is “a process by which collective experiences of an offending party’s (or their proxy’s) unjust behavior is discussed, morally evaluated, and prescribed a remedy—such as being fired or choosing to resign—through the collective reasoning of culturally aligned online crowds” (89). What this demonstrates is that canceling occurs when a person or group of people decide that their subjective interpretation of a piece of communication is what ultimately should decide how the public interprets what is being canceled. Moreover, the process that generates this perception of superiority in one’s subjective interpretation, I believe is closely tied to a perception of moral superiority. I argue that examining where people believe that this superiority comes from is at the foundation of what motivates those who cancel. Where this notion becomes increasingly complex is in determining whether that morality is rooted in an objective basis or in opinion, especially when dealing with emotional topics that are of great consequence to us.

The reason that I believe networked framing in cancel culture is so destructive is because of the unjustified designation of an arbiter which is decided on the basis of group identity or “culturally aligned online crowds.” On twitter, Instagram, Facebook and other online platforms, no institution or authority decided their appointment to the position of arbiter, it’s blatant self-appointment by one group that claims moral superiority on the basis of their disagreement. In other words, they are right because they are offended. What makes this self-appointment so easy is the absence of conversation. There is no room for persuasion in the canceling dynamic because there is no room for conversation when there is only one perspective dominating arbitration. If anyone were to present an argument for the side of that or who is being canceled, then they too will be considered morally abhorrent by the arbitrating group and, in turn, will suffer the same “remedies.” Moreover, I argue that these culturally aligned crowds have become so powerful that often their remedies don’t even need to be prescribed for a transgressor to be canceled. Often, people who have different opinions than those represented by the self-appointed arbiters will self-censor out of fear of the consequences that come with being canceled. On a broader/societal scale, the paramount consequence that these acts of self-censorship present, is the active discouragement of ideological diversity. If one is afraid to utter any opinion different than that of what the culturally aligned crowds hold, not only is there is no need for persuasion because there are no other valid opinions, but there is no mechanism to monitor or validate the opinions the that majority holds.

I believe it is also quite crucial to examine the motivations behind canceling and consider whether or not there are any situations in which canceling someone outright is completely justified. It may seem very reasonable in instances where blatant hatred, racism, xenophobia, sexism or any other kind of morally abhorrent behavior or communication is released into the public sphere that the offender should not be given a platform and should be canceled. When something is objectively morally abhorrent, I’m compelled to think that there is a social responsibility to remove whoever performs this transgression. Yet, who is to judge whether or not the transgression is indeed objectively morally abhorrent and how do we know that this morality is objective? I believe that this is an impossible question to answer without knowing whether or not we consider morality subjective or objective, especially when considering a communication sphere like social media where countless different moral frameworks exist. Therefore, I hold that the most diplomatic solution would be to approach every case in the same way by having conversation as a necessary rule, even in cases where what is said may seem truly morally abhorrent. I believe this would be most effective for the purposes of creating a just arbiter, focused merely on the preservation of dialogue, as well as educating because open discourse is the only to get to the root of how a piece of media released into the public sphere is interpreted by people with different backgrounds and moral frameworks. Thus, rhetoric is the solution, not canceling.

It’s very easy to disagree on topics that are of no consequence to either party involved in a discussion. It’s a whole lot harder to disagree on topics that matter very much to us. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t disagree on those topics out of fear of upsetting or offending one another. If anything, if the topic means a lot to us and we’re disagreeing with someone, all the more reason to talk to them about it and see why they think the way they do. As Robert H. Jackson, former Justice of the United States Supreme Court once claimed, “freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much” (Scalia 335). Disagreement can be healthy if a conversation ensues. Cancel culture fundamentally challenges conversation and finding a middle ground; it fundamentally challenges persuasion and rhetoric.

Works Cited

Bouvier, Gwen. “Racist call-outs and cancel culture on Twitter: The limitations of the platform’s ability to define issues of social justice.” Discourse, Context & Media 38 (2020): 100431.

Clark, Meredith. “DRAG THEM: A Brief Etymology of so-Called ‘Cancel Culture.’” Cornell Hospitality Quarterly, vol. 5, no. 3–4, Sept. 2020.

Duque, Richard B., Robert Rivera, and E. J. LeBlanc. “The Active Shooter Paradox: Why the rise of Cancel Culture, “Me Too”, ANTIFA and Black Lives Matter… Matters.” Aggression and Violent Behavior (2020): 101544.

Ng, Eve. “No grand pronouncements here…: Reflections on cancel culture and digital media participation.” Television & New Media 21.6 (2020): 621-627.

Sadler, Kelly. “Top 10 Recent Examples of Cancel Culture.” The Washington Times , The Washington Times, 16 Feb. 2021, www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/feb/16/top-10-recent-examples-cancel-culture/.

Scalia, Eugene. “John Adams, Legal Representation, and the” Cancel Culture”.” Harv. JL & Pub.Pol’y 44 (2021): 333-.

Rhetoric in Everyday Life Copyright © 2021 by Alex Herne is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Forming the Theoretical Framework of the “Cancel Culture”: Conceptual Roots and Current Interpretations

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Justifying Cancel Culture

Jeremy Stangroom casts a critical eye over some of the justifications offered for cancel culture.

Let’s, for the sake of argument, take “cancellation” to involve the attempt to deprive a person of the ability to make a political and cultural difference through their words and actions. This might be achieved variously by pressurising a university to withdraw an invitation to give a talk at a prestigious event (no-platforming); or persuading a publisher to cancel a book contract; or lobbying a social media company to terminate an account; or getting a potential employer to withdraw a job offer; or persuading a current employer to terminate a position of employment. The idea of cancellation is to neuter the target, to strip them of their ability to bring about certain kinds of perlocutionary effect – informing, influencing, persuading, inciting, and so on. If cancellation also functions as punishment, then so much the better. Not all cancellations are successful, of course, and some go spectacularly wrong, but for our purposes, it is the attempt that counts.

In these terms, cancellation sounds like a bad thing. It conjures up images of demented Twitter mobs, getting off on the frisson of collective outrage directed towards a “moral” end, seeking to destroy somebody’s career because of an intemperate remark they made when they were a teenager. But, in fact, the issue is more complex than this admittedly sometimes-accurate caricature.

The complexity lies in the fact that it is easy to identify occasions where it seems, certainly at first sight, that a limited form of cancellation would be a good option. For example, in our present circumstances, it is reasonable to think that universities should not offer a platform to a conspiracy theorist who wants to disseminate a message of COVID denial, and that were such a platform offered, people would be right to protest it.

Here the harm of allowing a COVID-denialist to speak at an institution of learning is clear and obvious. As well as providing a platform for the dissemination of misinformation, which might result directly in harm (if, for example, somebody in the audience cancels a vaccination appointment because of what they’ve heard), there is also a reputational boost for the speaker and the views they espouse. They gain because of the association with an institution of repute.

This point can be dressed up in some fancy philosophical clothes. The philosopher, Neil Levy, for example, talks about no-platforming in the context of “higher-order evidence” – evidence that doesn’t bear directly on the issue under consideration, but rather functions at one step removed. It’s evidence about evidence, how the evidence was generated, for example, whether it enjoys widespread support amongst a community of scholars, whether it has stood the test of time, whether it has been rigorously tested, and so on.

The provision of a platform by a prestigious institution of learning is a kind of higher-order evidence. It tells us, or apparently tells us, that we’re dealing with a respectable, academically legitimate, speaker, whose ideas are worthy of consideration. Obviously, universities, and other prestigious institutions, should not be in the business of generating false evidence, so if a speaker is known to espouse views that are obviously wrong, they should not be granted a platform. Stripped of its fancy philosophical clothes, this is an obvious point, and it’s long been understood.

An example from the world of academic philosophy will make the general point clear. The example takes us back to 1985, and the publication of Roger Scruton’s book, Thinkers of the New Left . Scruton tells the story of an exemplary cancellation.

My… book was published… at a time when I was still teaching in a university, and known among British left-wing intellectuals as a prominent opponent of their cause, which was the cause of decent people everywhere. The book was therefore greeted with derision and outrage, reviewers falling over each other for the chance to spit on the corpse. Its publication was the beginning of the end for my university career, the reviewers raising serious doubts about my intellectual competence as well as my moral character.

The book was published by Longman, a reputable academic publisher, which did not go down well with one unnamed Oxford philosopher.

One academic philosopher wrote to… the original publisher, saying, ‘I may tell you with dismay that many colleagues here [i.e., in Oxford] feel that the Longman imprint – a respected one – has been tarnished by association with Scruton’s work.’

The unnamed philosopher concluded his missive by expressing the hope that “the negative reactions generated by this particular publishing venture may make Longman think more carefully about its policy in the future.”

Scruton goes on to note that one of Longman’s best-selling educational authors threatened to move to a different publisher if Scruton’s book stayed in print, and, lo and behold, the remaining copies of Thinkers of the New Left quickly disappeared from bookshops (notwithstanding the dangers of a post hoc fallacy here).

The point is that it was not the publication of Scruton’s book per se that was unacceptable (though, obviously, its critics would have preferred for it not to have been published at all), it was the fact it was published by a respectable imprint, the sort of imprint favoured by legitimate – i.e., not conservative – academics. The respectability of the imprint provided higher-order evidence that Scruton’s take on the character of left-wing politics and thought was worthy of serious consideration, and this could not be allowed to stand.

The Scruton example points to a large tension in the view that concerns about higher-order evidence can justify certain kinds of cancellation. How is it possible to determine which ideas and viewpoints are acceptable and which are not? Who exactly gets to decide?

The philosophers Robert Mark Simpson and Amia Srinivasan answer these questions in terms of a framework that focuses on the norms and practices of the Academy, and the role that “recognised disciplinary experts” play in ensuring that intellectual rigour and disciplinary standards are upheld. Thus:

It is permissible for disciplinary gatekeepers to exclude cranks and shills from valuable communicative platforms in academic contexts, because effective training and research requires that communicative privileges be given to some and not others, based on people’s disciplinary competence.

Simpson and Srinivasan argue that the processes that amplify the speech of experts and marginalise the speech of non-experts are ubiquitous and routine within the Academy.

The professoriate decides which candidates have earned doctoral credentials. Editors of journals and academic presses exercise discretionary judgment to decide whose work will be published. The curriculum is set by faculty… and students work within it.

Therefore, there is nothing contrary to the ethos of academic freedom, or to a liberal politics that takes free speech seriously while recognising that universities are not just an extension of the public square, in depriving a person of a platform to express their views because of a negative appraisal of their credibility and content of their ideas.

There are things to be said in favour of this view, not least it allows us to dispose of now apparently easy cases such as our COVID-denier from earlier. But let’s examine the argument more closely through the lens of an example from 30 years ago.

In May 1992, several top philosophers, including W.V. Quine and David Armstrong, wrote an open letter to The Times newspaper protesting a proposal from Cambridge University to award doyen of French philosophy, Jacques Derrida, an honorary degree. Here are some choice excerpts from the letter:

In the eyes of philosophers, and certainly among those working in leading departments of philosophy throughout the world, M. Derrida’s work does not meet accepted standards of clarity and rigour.

Many French philosophers see in M. Derrida only cause for silent embarrassment, his antics having contributed significantly to the widespread impression that contemporary French philosophy is little more than an object of ridicule.

Academic status based on what seems to us to be little more than semi-intelligible attacks upon the values of reason, truth, and scholarship is not, we submit, sufficient grounds for the awarding of an honorary degree in a distinguished university.

The signatories of this letter were not exactly seeking to no platform Derrida, but it’s same basic phenomenon. The claim was that Derrida’s work is not of sufficient quality to warrant an honorary degree, and the letter implied that a distinguished university, and by extension the discipline of philosophy, would suffer reputational damage were the degree to be awarded.

So how should we view this attempted “cancelling” of Derrida, analysed in the light of Simpson and Srinivasan’s approach?

It seems, at the very least, that the cancelling is defensible from what is in their terms a “liberal” standpoint. If the letter writers were correct in their suggestion that among philosophers in the Anglophone tradition, overwhelmingly the dominant tradition in British and American universities at this time, Derrida’s work was not considered to meet acceptable standards of clarity and rigour, and that even among French philosophers, he was considered something of an embarrassment, then the disciplinary gatekeepers of philosophy had spoken, and Derrida should not have been awarded his degree (and also presumably should not have been invited to give prestigious lectures, and so on). Simpson and Srinivasan explicitly state that flouting epistemic and methodological norms of enquiry justifies the act of no-platforming, and it was precisely the claim of the letter writers that Derrida’s work flouts the established disciplinary norms of philosophy.

Obviously, there is some wriggle room here, not a lot, but a bit. Maybe Simpson and Srinivasan can just bite the bullet, and say that Derrida should not have been awarded his degree, and that it would have been defensible, perhaps even desirable, not to have invited him to give further talks and speeches. Maybe they can deny the claim of the letter writers that there was a groundswell of opinion among philosophers in leading universities that Derrida’s work was not up to standard. Maybe they can claim that the Derrida case is one of their hard cases because there was deep intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary disagreement about the status of Derrida’s work, and about whether he possessed the requisite disciplinary competence to be awarded an honorary degree.

So then, let’s bring the tensions in Simpson and Srinivasan’s account into sharper focus by considering a hypothetical case. It’s mid-1984, and Gustavo Gutiérrez, one of the founders of Latin American liberation theology, has a longstanding invitation to give a commencement speech at a prestigious Catholic university in North America. However, because of the recent publication of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger’s document, “Instruction on Certain Aspects of ‘Liberation Theology’”, which levels the accusation that most forms of liberation theology reduce Christianity to Marxism, a groundswell of opinion has developed in opposition to the speech going ahead.

The almost unanimous opinion of faculty experts and the student body is that Gutiérrez’s status as a reputable theologian is now in serious question. The invitation was always controversial, but Ratzinger’s report has confirmed the suspicions of even the more liberal members of faculty that Gutiérrez’s Marxism is incompatible with a proper understanding of the gospel. Therefore, the decision is made to withdraw the invitation, and to find an alternative speaker to give the speech.

What are we to make of this scenario? The first thing to point out is that while the scenario is hypothetical, the background to it is real. Liberation theology was highly controversial in North America in the 1980s, and, unsurprisingly, conservative, and other, theologians were deeply suspicious of its socialist aspects. A Vatican report from this era explicitly stated that Marxism was incompatible with Catholicism, and in the late summer of 1988, full-page adverts appeared in the Wall Street Journal and New York Times , which railed against the impact of liberation theology in fermenting a revolutionary consciousness in Latin America.

On the face of it, then, our scenario is not wildly implausible. So how should we view it if we take Simpson and Srinivasan’s account seriously? The answer is that there are no obvious grounds for objecting to the withdrawal of the invitation. There is a strong consensus among faculty and the student body that Gutiérrez’s embrace of Marxism severely undermines his credibility as a competent theologian. None of the university’s disciplinary experts will be inhibited in their teaching or research because of a decision to deny Gutiérrez a platform. Therefore, such a decision is entirely compatible with a respect for the autonomy of faculty professionals. Moreover, to the extent that cancelling the invitation functions to uphold the disciplinary authority of the university’s relevant experts, then (arguably) the decision should be supported not merely permitted.

This is surely an uncomfortable result for a defence of the practice of no-platforming that rests on liberal principles. Of course, in the present day, the right tends to call for fewer restrictions on speech, so it might seem like there is little potential in the real world for this sort of outcome, especially if one considers that the Academy skews left politically. Put simply, it’s hard to imagine that a decision to no platform motivated by right-wing concerns (e.g., the recent decision by Samford University to cancel Jon Meacham’s invitation to speak at its president inauguration because of his attendance at a Planned Parenthood event) could ever secure the required level of support among disciplinary gatekeepers to make it legitimate in Simpson and Srinivasan’s terms (though the Derrida example might come close - assuming one considers it to have been motivated by right-wing concerns). But nevertheless, dangers lurk for an approach that gives all the power to disciplinary gatekeepers. This can be nicely illustrated by considering one of Simpson and Srinivasan’s own examples.

There have been repeated calls to no platform Germaine Greer, the renowned feminist author, for her views on trans women. A lecture by Greer held in 2015 came under intense pressure, and though it went ahead in the end, it did so under high security. Simpson and Srinivasan recognise that there are deep divisions within feminist theory over questions of sex and gender identity, and that consequently there simply isn’t enough agreement to make it possible to characterise Greer’s no-platforming as a case of somebody being excluded for lacking disciplinary competence. So far, so good. But they go on, rather wistfully it seems, to suggest that this might not always be the case.

At some point it may cease to be a matter of controversy – among experts with broadly comparable credentials in relevant disciplines – whether Greer’s view represents some kind of failure of disciplinary competence. If ascendant trends in feminist theory continue, it is possible that Greer’s trans-exclusionary ( sic ) views might one day be rejected by all credentialed experts in the relevant humanities or social science disciplines.

Yes, that’s certainly possible. It is also possible that the debate might resolve in the opposite direction, that “ascendant trends” might reverse, and the gender critical view might become the orthodox view. What then? If Simpson and Srinivasan are brave enough to follow the logic of their own argument, they must accept it might become permissible to no platform a speaker for espousing the view that trans women are women, which is not a comfortable position for a liberal to occupy.

In fact, there is something deeply suspect about the idea that “disciplinary experts” should hold sway over these sorts of issues. It seems to be rooted in an implicit whig historiography, allied to the notion that scholars in the humanities and social sciences function in something approaching an ideal speech situation, forming a community of impartial experts proceeding by reason alone, making arguments and weighing up evidence in the pursuit of shared epistemic goals.

Well, the Academy is not like that, not in the least bit like that (though it is very tempting for academics to believe that it is). It is necessary to paint in broad brush strokes here, exaggerating a little, to make the point clear. I’ll speak to sociology, and its related disciplines, because that is what I know.

Sociology as a discipline is political all the way down. The explanatory frameworks within which it operates – and there are more than one, because sociology remains in a pre-paradigmatic state (to borrow some language from Thomas Kuhn) – are political even when they are not ostensibly political (because each rests upon a particular conception of how society functions at its base). If you spend your time doing empirical work, you might not notice this politicisation, but the moment you move into the domain of sociological theory, or political sociology, you’re operating on the terrain of the political.

Sociologists as a group are overwhelmingly on the political left (in fact, multiple studies confirm that the social sciences, generally, skew heavily to the left). Partly this is because young radicals and activists are attracted to disciplines such as sociology, but it is also because there is (now) a self-selecting dynamic in play – put simply, conservative students might end up taking one course in sociology, but probably they’re not going to take two. Matthew Woessner, a conservative Professor of Public Policy, relates a story that is instructive in this regard:

I recall that as a naive sophomore I enrolled in an introductory sociology course and was surprised that the professor was an avowed Marxist. Concerned that our ideological perspectives might ultimately affect my course grade, I tried unsuccessfully to lay low. However, noting that I cringed as she denounced Reagan’s economic policies, the professor asked if I had a different take on the issue. Somewhat reluctantly, I offered a defence of Reaganomics. To her credit, she listened attentively and, as far as I could tell, took my novel ideas seriously. In light of the fact that, by her own admission, she had never heard a spirited defence of conservative economic policies, it became clear to me that sociology was an ideological minefield.

The consequence of all this is that sociologists, and academics working in related disciplines, tend to operate in extremely insular and self-reflexive academic environments, characterised by the almost complete absence of conservative voices. In this context, epistemic goals are secondary to political goals. To (incorrectly) paraphrase Marx, the point isn’t to understand the world, the point is to change it.

As I noted above, this is something of an exaggeration, but not as much as you’d probably imagine. Consider, for example, that the Department of Gender Studies at the London School of Economics (I take gender studies to be a discipline related to sociology) tells us studying gender “opens up space for thinking about other forms of oppression, discrimination and inequality”, and notes that the department is “strongly committed to the principle that gender theory is the foundation of policy, practice and activism: Theory saves lives.” Similarly, the Sociology Department at Essex University identifies the “big questions” as “Why are societies unequal?”, “What is equality?”, “What does it mean to hold power over others?”, “Why are some societies violent?”, and declares that studying sociology at Essex will “help you develop a sociological imagination to take out into the world and change it for the better.” Lastly, if you check out the web page for SOAS’s Centre for Gender Studies, you’ll learn that the Centre is “a hub of research and training working to support anti-racist feminisms and social movements challenging normative constructions of gender and sexuality.”

If you’re interested a more rigorous take on similar themes as it applies in an American context, Christian Smith’s The Sacred Project of American Sociology (OUP, 2014) is well worth a look. He argues that sociology today is “animated by sacred impulses, driven by sacred commitments, and serves a sacred project.” Sociology concerns itself with:

…exposing, protesting, and ending through social movements, state regulations, and government programs all human inequality, oppression, exploitation, suffering, injustice, poverty, discrimination, exclusion, hierarchy, constraint and domination by, of, and over other humans (and perhaps animals and the environment).

The point of all this is that “disciplinary experts” in sociology, and related disciplines, are not objective, unbiased producers of knowledge, who view the world from nowhere, and share common epistemic goals, but rather they are (often) highly politicised, activist professors and researchers who create “knowledge” through the filter of their ideological and moral commitments. The consequence is that there are few good epistemic reasons to think their judgements about the contentious issues that often surround cases of no-platforming should hold sway. For example, it might well be the case that among relevant disciplinary experts a consensus has emerged that “racism” must be defined as involving prejudice plus systemic power. But this would not establish the “disciplinary incompetence” of a social psychologist, for example, who dissented from this definition, and therefore it could not provide legitimate grounds for a no-platforming.

To date, it’s proven quite difficult to pin down precisely which ideas and viewpoints are legitimately subject to “cancellation”, and who exactly would be involved in such a determination. Perhaps, then, a more fruitful way forward can be found by exploring whether some general criterion of harm can be identified that would justify shutting down certain kinds of speech and ideas.

The first point to make is that the law, in the UK at least, affords certain protections in this regard. For example, The Racial and Religious Hatred Act (2006) makes it illegal to stir up racial or religious hatred, with a person guilty of an offence if they use threatening, abusive or insulting words with that intent; and The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act (1994) outlaws the public use of threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour if the intent is to cause a person harassment, alarm or distress.

It goes without saying that a commitment to the importance of free speech and to academic freedom does not entail thinking that people have the right to say absolutely anything they want when they want. Clearly, the incitement of violence should be prohibited, as should targeted harassment, and indeed other forms of speech that threaten specific, serious and immediate harm. J. S. Mill’s famous harm principle looms large here – namely, that “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.”

The trouble is, as always in these matters, the devil is in the detail. Let’s look at some of the complexities involved by means of an example.

A proselytising atheist has been invited to give a talk at a British University. She’s the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him (h/t George Orwell). The following things are true:

1) She will not violate UK law during her speech – more than that she will explicitly disavow hatred and/or discrimination linked to anti-religious sentiment.

2) She will make it very clear that belief in God cannot be justified on rational (or evidential) grounds, and that the baggage that goes along with religious belief – ensoulment, the afterlife, and so on – is similarly lacking in justification.

3) She’ll make her points using arguments that are rationally defensible (i.e., her talk won’t be a kind of knockabout theatre).

4) She is a very effective speaker, and her words will strike home.

5) Religious believers in the audience will be hurt and offended by her words. They will feel that their religious identity, mediated through a personal relationship with God, has been called into question, disrespected and invalidated.

6) The wider religious community at the university will also believe that they have been harmed by our atheist speaker’s words, albeit indirectly. Specifically, they will experience, or at least believe they have experienced, an uptick in harassment which they will link to the fact the talk went ahead.

7) There is reason to believe that the event will be disrupted, and the possibility of (minor) injuries cannot be ruled out if this happens.

The question here is obvious – does this set of circumstances provide legitimate grounds to no platform our proselytizing atheist (assuming we know in advance how all this will play out)?

It is entirely possible to answer “yes” to this question, and to construct a minimally defensible argument, balancing the harm of supressing free expression against the direct and indirect harms of allowing the talk to go ahead, to justify cancelling the event.

But several problems with this response immediately spring to mind. The first is that there are no obviously decisive arguments to be deployed here. Consequently, the justification offered for cancelling the talk is unlikely to persuade anybody who is not already sympathetic to the justice of this course of action. As Simpson and Srinivasan point out, in the context of a different example, any justification that supports the decision to no platform based on this kind of harm profile will have to engage with several tricky and contested philosophical puzzles, each of which on its own will be a challenge to surmount. For example, it’s not immediately obvious how to respond to an interlocutor who insists that if we no platform a speaker who explicitly disavows violence and discrimination, because of a worry that violent disruption might follow an event, we’re in effect holding the speaker responsible for actions that she plays no part in and cannot control, and also providing a heckler’s veto to any group willing to cause trouble about an event they don’t like.

A second problem is that there are going to be difficulties with cases that are structurally identical (or near identical), but where there are different actors involved. Put simply, there’s the danger we’re going to find ourselves, on the pain of inconsistency, having to support a decision to no platform that we’d much rather oppose. For example, imagine we tweak our scenario so that the university is in the American deep south, the atheist is a person of colour concerned to advocate for a pro-choice position, and the religious believers are white protestants, not affluent, but thoroughly conservative in their worldview. Everything else remains the same. Does the intuition about this scenario come out the same way? If not, why not, and is there a justification to explain the difference that can be deployed consistently across other similar kinds of scenario?

A final problem is that allowing that cancellation is justified in this sort of case will almost inevitably end up in an arms race with opponents across ideological divides accusing each other of causing direct and indirect harm through their words and deeds. It is possible to see this dynamic at work on Twitter, where ideological opponents engage in tit for tat cancellation attempts (see, for example, the controversy surrounding comedian David Chappelle’s recent Netflix comedy special), sometimes over the same issue after it turns out that the instigator of the original callout had themselves, a number of years previously, engaged in the behaviour about which they’re now complaining.

It seems clear that thinking about harm isn’t going to give us much clarity on which ideas and viewpoints are legitimately subject to “cancellation”. Likely everybody will agree that certain sorts of speech should be regulated because of the potential for harm (for example, shouting fire in a crowded theatre), but that’s not going to help us with the contentious cases that tend to provoke a firestorm around this issue. People are not going to agree about which ideas are harmful and which are not, about the difference between intentional and unintentional harm, about who it is that is harmed, about the moral significance of purely private harms (for example, hurt feelings, offence, and so on), about the significance of indirect harm, about how to balance the presumption of the right to free speech against harm reduction imperatives, and so on. Harm just isn’t the magic bullet that’s going to get us clear on the justifications for no-platforming and “cancellation”, more generally.

I want to finish up by looking at the issue of harm from a slightly different angle, returning to some of the concerns we talked about earlier. It will be remembered that one purported justification of no-platforming has to do with “higher-order evidence”. To recap, the argument has the following form:

1) There is an imperative for reputable institutions of learning not to generate inaccurate evidence.

2) If such an institution provides a platform to an “undeserving” speaker, it precisely generates such (higher-order) evidence, because it erroneously communicates the message that the speaker is worth taking seriously and has ideas and views that are academically respectable.

3) It follows that if a speaker is going to use a platform to disseminate nonsense, then the platform ought to be withdrawn.

We’ve seen that this justification runs into choppy waters as soon as it comes to the task of establishing criteria by means of which it can be determined which ideas and views are legitimately subject to cancellation. However, there is another problem with the “higher-order evidence” argument that has to do with thoughts about harm.

The decision to no platform, or otherwise cancel, a person is itself a kind of higher-order evidence. In the case of a decision to no platform, it signals that the institution in question does not consider a speaker to be reputable, trustworthy, serious, scholarly, and so on. It might also, depending on the circumstances, function as evidence that the speaker should be considered morally abhorrent, a racist or some other kind of bigot, for example. As Simpson and Srinivasan put it, “no platforming generally expresses the view that the targeted person is morally or politically beyond the pale, and that they should thus be denied a voice on campus.”

These are not trifling matters. It is the kind of thing that ruins lives, easily destroying a person’s self-image and confidence, devastating a career, ending friendships, leaving the target isolated and alone. It is trivially easy to detect the retributive impulse lurking in the background of campaigns to no platform, so it’s not as though these outcomes are merely unintended side-effects of a righteous desire to prevent misinformation and ensure moral probity. They are part of the point, designed to exert a deterrent effect in case anybody in the future is tempted to stick their head above the parapet.

At the very least, what this means is that you’ve got to be certain that you’re on solid ground, that you have arguments that lead inexorably to the conclusion that the decision to no platform is justified (even in the face of the potential harm it will cause). But how is that possible given that the issues surrounding cancellation tend to be contentious?

There is a lesson here from how philosophers sometimes talk about higher-order evidence that comes from disagreement. A standard view is that if two interlocutors of similar intellectual competence and experience disagree about some complex issue despite having access to the same evidence, then both should be less confident about their own conclusions. This follows because divergent conclusions means that at least one person has made a mistake in working out what the evidence entails, and since both are epistemic equals, neither has strong reason to suppose that it is the other person rather than themselves who has made the mistake.

This is analogous to the situation that people find themselves in when it comes to a contentious cancellation. Serious, intellectually competent, people will disagree about whether the cancellation is justified. This fact should make everybody involved less confident about their own position. But the requirement for epistemic humility imposes a greater burden on the side pushing for cancellation than it does on the side objecting to it. The reason is obvious – you don’t risk doing serious damage to a person’s well-being unless you’re absolutely confident the risk is justified, and normally you cannot be confident the risk is justified.

There are several possible rejoinders here. Perhaps the most obvious is to claim that cancellation, whether it is in the form of a decision to no platform, or under some other guise, doesn’t tend to mess up people’s lives. If you support the principle of no-platforming, there might be a temptation to point out that efforts to cancel a person often backfire, and in fact targets frequently go on to greater and better things. Trouble is, this response does rather cut the legs out from under one of the main reasons for thinking that a cancellation might be justified in the first place. Put simply, if the consequence of a successful campaign to no platform a speaker, for example, is that they end up on national television with a much bigger audience than before, then the higher-order evidence calculus has decidedly gone against you. In the age of social media, the old established institutions of learning no longer enjoy a hegemony, if they ever enjoyed one, over the production and dissemination of specialised knowledge. In this new reality, you’re playing a dangerous game if you think you can control the fallout from attempts to cancel your ideological enemies.

Jeremy Stangroom is a founding editor of The Philosophers’ Magazine, and has a PhD in Political Sociology from the London School of Economics. He is the author of the international bestseller Einstein’s Riddle .

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How Do You Feel About Cancel Culture?

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

By Nicole Daniels

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The second wave of “cancel culture”

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

by Aja Romano

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conservatives are using fear of cancel culture as a cudgel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Very few “canceled” public figures suffer significant career setbacks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Is Cancel Culture Effective?

Fall 2020  |  By Nicole Dudenhoefer ’17 |  Illustrations by Matt Chase

Mob mentality. A modern social justice practice. An impediment to free speech. A platform for marginalized voices. Call it what you will. Cancel culture is a concept so hotly debated that it remains in limbo, much like many individuals’ attitudes toward it.

The one common theme everyone seems to agree on is that cancel culture involves taking a public stance against an individual or institution for actions considered objectionable or offensive. But is it an effective way to hold those in positions accountable, or is it punishment without a chance for redemption?

In July, when Harper’s Magazine published “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate” — a critique on cancel culture without directly naming it — it was met with immediate backlash. The letter was initially signed by 153 notable individuals, including J.K. Rowling — who has recently faced calls for cancellation due to social media comments considered transphobic by some. For Mel Stanfill, UCF assistant professor of texts and technology , the letter is an example of how cancel culture can be a complicated practice.

“I think cancel culture can reflect awareness that people are not willing to accept things that they used to accept or have not been able to resist in the past, but in some ways it’s a moral panic,” says Stanfill, who is also an assistant professor of English . “The Harper’s letter was a bunch of really rich and famous people writing in a national magazine about how they’ve been silenced — yet they still get access to this forum. So it highlights the fact that [cancel culture is] this fear over something that is not actually real. So if we’re going to talk about cancel culture, we can’t talk about it in isolation, we have to put it in context.”

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Cancel Culture Essays

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

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

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

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

How to write an essay on cancel culture

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

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

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

Some excellent topics to discuss are the following:

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

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

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What Is Cancel Culture, and Is It a Good Thing?

Photo by Robin Jonathan Deutsch

The ongoing debate about “cancel culture” provides a glimpse into the scope of political polarization in the United States. Opposing sides can’t agree about what it is, who’s doing it to whom, or even whether it exists.

Let’s start with a simple summary: The right rejects any attempt to hold people accountable for ugly or hateful comments, decrying such efforts as cancel culture run amok, Meanwhile, the left argues that cancel culture is not real but merely a creation of right-wing fear-mongering, except when the right cancels liberals and leftists.

There are kernels of truth in those caricatures, but they obscure as much as they reveal. Such snark might be fun, but we need to have less fun in these debates. To make a productive conversation possible, we should start with definitions, which may be boring but increases our chances of understanding each other and minimizes the tendency toward self-righteousness.

There are a variety of terms for the process of disciplining someone for a perceived political or moral offense: shunning (refusing to associate with someone and encouraging others to do the same), canceling (removing someone from a position), or de-platforming (curtailing someone’s ability to speak in some public setting). Who gets canceled and how it plays out will depend on the public visibility of the person, the issue in question, and the power of the people doing the disciplining.

Context and details are crucial. Sometimes people who complain that they have been canceled have simply been critiqued in perfectly appropriate ways by people with whom they disagree. But sometimes people who say they have been canceled have been treated unfairly simply for holding a political position not favored in a group. Some definitional clarity is in order.

Within a political or social group with a mission and shared values, no one doubts that the group should enforce certain ideological baselines. Let’s start with a playful example. Several friends establish a chess club. A person who hates chess (perhaps a fanatical parent harangued this poor child to play constantly, resulting in a pathological anti-chess attitude) joins the club to disrupt others’ enjoyment of the game. No one would say that expelling the chess-hater from the club would be an inappropriate act of canceling, even if the person were an exceptional chess player. The group exists for a specific reason, which poses no threat to anyone outside the group, and disrupting the group serves no positive purpose.

Let’s move to a more realistic example. Imagine a community group is engaged in progressive political organizing on an issue such as militarism, economic justice, or environmental protection. If a member of the group consistently makes racist or sexist comments, should the group discipline or expel the offender? The first step might be to confront the person in a way that seeks resolution— “calling in” (reaching out to the person who has engaged in inappropriate behavior for dialogue) rather than “calling out” (publicly challenging or shaming them). But if the offender refuses to reconsider and argues that views on race and sex/gender are irrelevant to the group’s focus, must the group accept that individual?

It’s difficult to argue for inclusion, on at least two grounds. First, such comments can create a hostile environment that makes it difficult for others to participate. Second, even if the group includes only white men, a racist or sexist politics that accepts hierarchy on those fronts can’t be squared with a progressive challenge to hierarchy and abuse on other fronts. On the left side of the fence, no one tries to offer an intellectual defense of racism or sexism.

Things get trickier in more public realms, especially when the power of governments is in play. In U.S. law, the dominant interpretation of the First Amendment’s protection of free speech and press provides wide latitude for citizens. But when an individual is acting on behalf of a public institution, where duties are as important as rights, things get murkier.

Should a professor at a public university be disciplined for making openly racist comments in class? Context is relevant, but such comments are likely to create a hostile environment that deprives some students of the education they are there for, and so discipline would be appropriate. If the professor’s comments were subtler, with disagreement over the racist character of the remarks, things get more difficult to resolve. What about a professor who pursues research on intelligence that some people believe to be either overtly racist or motivated by unconscious racism? Again, context matters, but that professor can claim academic freedom.

And then there are the cases from mass media and pop culture. What price should individuals in the public eye pay for actions that are deemed inappropriate in some way?

First, we have to distinguish between inappropriateness and illegal behavior. Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein was not canceled for being inappropriate. He was a serial sexual predator who eventually was convicted of rape. Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly was dropped by the network after news leaked that he had settled five lawsuits filed by women accusing him of sexual harassment and misconduct. Prosecutors go after criminals. Corporations fire employees who violate work rules or expose the firm to damages for abusive behavior. Behavior that is illegal or creates serious legal liability is well outside discussions of cancel culture.

But other cases are more vexing, sometimes involving actions decades before, sometimes involving jokes that were acceptable in some segments of the dominant culture at the time, or actions that the perpetrator has admitted to and apologized for. Consider these cases: A white politician who appeared in blackface while in medical school, and a male politician accused of making sexist jokes and inappropriate touching while hugging supporters. Neither was accused of holding racist or sexist views in the present or pursuing racist or sexist political agendas. The former ( Ralph Northam , the governor of Virginia) stayed in office and served out his term without incident. The latter ( Al Franken , the US senator from Minnesota) resigned under pressure, a decision that he, along with some who had demanded his resignation, later regretted. Like-minded people can disagree, and in these cases did.

To repeat, context is relevant. When an apology for racist or sexist comments seems sincere, should offenders be treated differently than those who won’t acknowledge wrongdoing? In cases where evidence is not conclusive, how do we balance a desire to protect people from the abusive behavior of others with the need for fairness in fact-finding and deliberation? Given how different people can perceive the same event in very different ways, how do we resolve such disagreements when there is no evidence beyond self-reports? Even when it is widely agreed that the alleged speech or actions are inappropriate, these factors complicate our decision-making processes.

Another set of challenges arise when people don’t agree on whether the statements and actions in question are inappropriate. Sometimes those debates take place in the culture at large, with people on opposite sides of the analysis. Sometimes such debates can also play out within an otherwise unified political group or movement. The question of Confederate symbols is an example of the former; some on the right defend them as “heritage not hate” while almost everyone on the left (myself included) denounce them as expressions of white supremacy. The debate over drag shows provides an opportunity to consider the latter; most on the left endorse drag except for radical feminists (myself included) who view it as a form of cultural appropriation.

This brief exploration isn’t meant to exhaust the topic but rather point out there are rarely simple answers about how social groups should enforce norms. But even if context and complexity mean there are no hard-and-fast rules, we can look for guidelines.

For me, a central question is whether a comment or action is merely offensive or truly oppressive. In a pluralistic society, I expectt to be offended on a regular basis because of conflicting values. But when people’s words and deeds help maintain or deepen systems of oppression, a collective response is justified.

That doesn’t tell us what responses are appropriate in any particular situation, but it can be the start of a conversation. These days, that’s a step forward.

This essay is adapted from It’s Debatable: Talking Authentically about Tricky Topics , published by Olive Branch Press .

Robert Jensen is an emeritus professor in the School of Journalism and Media at the University of Texas at Austin and a founding board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center . He collaborates with New Perennials Publishing and the New Perennials Project at Middlebury College. Jensen can be reached at  [email protected] . To join an email list to receive articles by Jensen, go to  http://www.thirdcoastactivist.org/jensenupdates-info.html . Follow him on Twitter:  @jensenrobertw  

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Cancel Culture

A Critical Analysis

• © 2022

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

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

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About this book

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

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

Table of contents (6 chapters)

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

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

Bibliographic Information

Book Title : Cancel Culture

Book Subtitle : A Critical Analysis

Authors : Eve Ng

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

Publisher : Palgrave Macmillan Cham

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

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

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

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

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

Edition Number : 1

Number of Pages : IX, 153

Topics : Cultural Studies , Media and Communication

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Cancel culture: a force for good or a threat to free speech?

Discussion about cancel culture has become heated, but who is really in the right? Is it a useful tool for social justice or a form of censorship? We speak to activists, psychologists and authors to find a way forward

Let’s begin with what cancel culture is and what it isn’t, because it has come to mean a great deal of different things to different people. To some, it poses a grave danger to free speech. To some, it is a new take on ‘political correctness gone mad’ and a method used by the intolerant left to enforce a puritanical censure.

To others, it’s just a way of saying that someone has done something they perceive to be offensive and therefore has lost their respect. It is not a new phenomenon – free speech has always had consequences, especially when that speech has the potential for harm. High-profile figures have been challenged and publicly criticised for apparent wrongdoings by the media for decades, celebrities who have acted in opposition with a company’s values have been dropped and politicians regularly pillory their opponents. Today, it can be viewed as a way of defending the weak against higher powers. Rightly or wrongly, cancel culture gives the marginalised an amplified voice and a way to challenge damaging narratives promoted by the status quo.

Its purest definition is the boycotting of a person or organisation because of an objectionable comment or act. It is the withdrawal of support, be it no longer watching films that the offending person has starred in or books that they have written. The cancellation is akin to voiding a contract, severing ties with someone or something that you might have previously been a fan of.

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What it isn’t is call-out culture, which is highlighting a mistake, condemning it if it’s harmful and asking them to do better so that the individual doesn’t make the same error again. Both are linked to public shaming, and both have been used as a way of achieving social justice. Both have become extremely divisive over the past six months, reaching a crescendo last week over comments made by JK Rowling about the trans community. She, along with over 150 academics, writers and authors, penned a public letter condemning cancel culture (thought to be an escalation of call-out culture) on the basis that it threatens the right to free speech, “the lifeblood of a liberal society”, arguing that it promotes an “intolerance of opposing views [and] a vogue for public shaming and ostracism”. It’s a fascinating line to take – to argue that something endangers free speech by telling others that they don’t have the right to theirs.

There are many pitfalls of cancel culture if we take it to mean boycotting a person and expunging them from society. “When does ‘cancelling’ cross over with bullying?” asks the psychologist, lecturer and author Dr Audrey Tang. “The number of Lea Michele’s co-workers who spoke up about her poor behaviour may have been making a point, which Lea Michele addressed, but I refer to the tragic suicide of Caroline Flack. What outcome do those calling for change actually want? Unfortunately, when we say anything, we simply do not know how others will react.”

“Psychologically, cancel culture carries echoes of Melanie Klein’s ‘Splitting Theory,’” says the psychotherapist Lucy Beresford. “This is where small children separate the world into good or bad, and can’t integrate or tolerate the two sides of someone or something. For example, when a parent stops them having ice-cream between meals, they are ‘all bad’ and the child will be furious, whereas when they kiss the child goodnight, they are now ‘all good’ and the child is content. As we grow up, ideally, we are able to hold in our hearts the idea that someone can have different views from us and still be a good or decent person. Cancel culture doesn’t allow for the same kind of nuance.”

One of the potential issues with cancel culture is how it taps into feelings of shame, which rarely helps or propels an individual to learn and make positive changes. Essentially, it renders cancel culture ineffective when it comes to social justice, which is its goal. The research professor Brené Brown, who has spent two decades studying vulnerability, shame and empathy, says that shame is rarely productive.

We think we can shame people into being better, but that’s not true

“We think that shaming is a great moral compass, that we can shame people into being better, but that’s not true,” says Brown in a recent episode of her Unlocking Us podcast . “Here’s a great example that comes up a lot when I’m talking about parenting. You have a kid who tells a lie, so you shame that child, and say, ‘You’re a liar.’ Shame corrodes the part of us that thinks that we can be different. If I’m a liar, if that’s who I am, how do I ever change? How do I ever make a different decision? This is versus ‘You’re a good person and you told a lie, and that behaviour is not OK in this family.’ Everyone needs a platform of self-worth from which to see change.”

Shame is different to guilt, which can prompt positive behaviour. “When we see people apologising, making amends and changing their behaviour, that is always around guilt,” says Brown. “Guilt, the whole ‘I am bad’, is not easy. It creates psychological pain, ‘I have done something that is inconsistent or incongruous with my values or who I want to be.’ When we apologise or make amends for something we’ve done and change our behaviour, guilt is the driving force. It’s a positive, socially adaptive experience.”

The activist and author Jenna Arnold, who was one of the key organisers of the history-making Washington Women’s March in March 2017, agrees that cancel culture is unproductive on the basis that the shame associated with being wrong deters people from moving forward. “It doesn’t leave space for redemption, and while this isn’t an opportunity to pardon those who have caused harm, it is worth the exercise of watching the very important role humility and responsibility can and need to take in a world that is trying to right its way.”

The idea of pushing someone out - because they have said or done something perceived to be offensive - leaves no room for growth or learning. Matt Haig describes cancel culture as “anti-progress because it is anti-change”. “Cancelling people pushes them away and makes them more likely to find spaces where bad views are the norm,” he says. “Obviously, if someone has been convicted of, say, violence or sexual assault then they need to be punished, but cancel culture isn’t that. Cancel culture, as I see it, involves the shutting down of different perspectives and treating people like mere disposable artefacts in the cultural economy.”

Cancel culture involves the shutting down of different perspectives and treating people as disposable

If the purpose of cancel culture is a method to achieve justice for marginalised groups or people, then its influence isn’t as great as we’ve been led to believe. Of individuals who have been ‘cancelled’ over recent years, many are still working and enjoying relative success. Many have not seen long-term boycotts – R Kelly still makes music, Woody Allen still shoots films and Louis CK still performs.

The problem with cancel culture is that it has become too broad, and near meaningless. R Kelly was cancelled over decades of sexual-assault allegations, yet so too was Jodie Comer for dating a Republican. There is no proportion. It is used in so many different contexts, both heavy and light, that it oversimplifies, and loses its weight because it allows those who have engaged in dangerous and/or harmful rhetoric and behaviour to ride on the backlash.

“When something becomes ‘fashionable’ it can lose meaning,” says Dr Tang. “For example, when the debate around Dominic Cummings’ lockdown behaviour was a social-media trend, the calls were to resign, but why not a hefty fine? Why not a suspension? In the workplace ‘you’re fired’ is not the only option. We should not allow the complexity of the human brain to be reduced to a hashtag.”

In the eyes of cancel culture, people are reduced to good or bad with no room for anything in-between. “The process is like air-brushing someone or something out,” says Beresford, “It doesn’t allow for the possibility that two sides could ever agree, or learn from each other, or could persuade each other of their arguments – or even agree to disagree.”

Being told you’re wrong is not the same as being cancelled

That’s not to say that individuals should not be held accountable when they air a questionable view or do something wrong. Call-out culture is just that, the idea that we can challenge someone’s opinion or action without deleting them, therefore leaving them with room to grow and learn. “Being called out has made me a better person,” said Jameela Jamil on Instagram. “Not being cancelled has enabled me to be accountable, learn from my mistakes, and go on to share those lessons with others and do good with my privilege. Most of us have the potential to do that.”

When we decide to call someone out, we must resist a combative approach if we want to have the best chance of helping that person see the issues with what they may said or done. Most of us respond to criticism with defensiveness. Dr Tang says the best results come from talking to someone privately and also to challenge without accusation.

“Ask a question first to generate explanation. For example, ‘When you said x what did you mean by that?’” advises Dr Tang. “It doesn’t have to be nasty, nor humiliating. In fact, the more diplomatic you are, the more likely you are to effect a change of mind and that is after all, what you want. A subtle private message to see if they acted in error is more likely to influence than having a go. The latter only results in defensiveness that neither party wants fundamentally. The debate often turns on wanting to win rather than any form of learning.”

Instead of calling people out, we must start calling them in

Jenna Arnold says we must use forms of restorative justice that don’t make people feel threatened and therefore less likely to want to change. She wants to evolve our concept of call-out culture, instead arguing for ‘call-in culture’.

“My aim is to provide practical tools to use as we start listening with open hearts to others and inviting them to listen to us in the same manner — as, instead of calling people out, we start calling them in,” she says. “We must put aside the urge to win — or maybe just redefine what winning means. We’re not stirring the pot with the goal of a neat resolution or a concrete answer; rather, we want to start uncomfortable conversations for the sake of urgently needed exploration. This can be hard to fully internalise. Yet this hard work is the most essential antidote to the polarisation widening the rifts in society and within ourselves."

By calling each other in, rather than out, when it comes to debate, we take into account the fundamental human desire for acceptance and to be part of a collective.

“Human beings yearn for community,” she says. “We are longing to belong to something bigger than ourselves. Inviting people into the conversation — calling each other ‘in’ versus calling each other ‘out’ — is key to our survival. But that doesn’t only need to happen in the wake of an awkward statement, bumper sticker or post-election conversation. We need to share ideas and seek out the perspectives of others in our communities, throughout our lives. We’re no longer allowed to go back to sleep, no matter who is in the White House or how fair the world suddenly becomes. Being a citizen is active, hard, constant work.”

We live in a society where it’s easier than ever to have our voices heard – social media was designed for it. What we must do now is listen, regardless of which side we fall on. The free-speech argument is two-fold – progress will not be achieved through silencing either party, whether that’s ‘cancelling’ someone, or by dismissing one’s right to criticise. Being told you’re wrong is not the same as being deleted. It’s time to listen, process and move forward.

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Cancel Culture Argument/Essay

Hi, I recently wrote an argument against cancel culture for a hs English class and have been tasked with publishing it somewhere on the internet, so I figured this would be a good place.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Hzcg1WMM18cXLIN-j7wwB3TVjeEs5rt6E42CMrynOcU/edit?usp=sharing

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