Cancel Culture does the exact opposite of its original intentions and here’s why

Photo by Kaitlyn Baker on Unsplash

Trigger and Content Warnings: Racism, Ableism, Suicide, Eugenics, Doxxing, Bullying, Harassment, Punishment, TERF mention, Paedophilia mention, and more.

sighs*… This is a topic I wanted to do for a while because every time I go on the Internet, there is always drama on who is “bad” for liking something that others don’t even like and there are always netizens (internet citizens if anyone is wondering what ‘netizens’ is) who all of a sudden lose their own sense of critical thinking when it comes to fandoms who’ve already got enough shit on their plates and deserve much better than the shit hands dealt to them by people who know next-to-nothing about fandoms, specifically the Sonic fandom, Undertale and Deltarune fandoms, Furry fandoms, and many more fandoms that actively practice and increase a sense of open-mindedness, a sense of belonging and community and a sense of heightened self-esteem, and acceptance of both one’s own self and others, not fandoms that are already poisonous towards others along with fandoms actively shitting on people with their own sense of critical thinking.

However, I can understand why some people would try to be like this in some ways since some netizens see behaviour that is discriminatory/bigoted towards marginalised and racialised communities from influential people in power and influential brands and I can understand why they would be justifiably harsh on said influential people due to the bigotry, disenfranchisement, and ignorance of real-life consequences resulting from their actions. But… the limits of how much I can be able to understand why people would cancel others for what they like and for anything they problematise are there internally (mentally and emotionally) and externally (how I react based on how I respond to what my emotions are telling me about it) because sometimes people cancel others for the most trivial shit like which pairings or ships people like… I wonder what happened to just let oneself merely dislike shit instead of just using moralistic and/or healthist language along with the often false equation of “fiction = reality” (meaning that ‘fiction affects reality’) to overly-justify behaviours similar to bullying, harassment, doxxing, suicide baiting, and harassment in anti-ship communities (one has the right to establish boundaries between real life and fiction while understanding that what they feel comfortable in exploring and what helps them cope with life’s bullshit in fiction isn’t okay in real life nor will ever be condoned in real life)…

These kinds of behaviours from anti-ship communities can often make fandom communities feel more unsafe and more discriminatory, even when there are LGBTQ+ youth who shit on elder LGBTQ+ folks and the wisdom and experiences elder LGBTQ+ folks have just because of their age and the language they use from their experiences to part knowledge to young LGBTQ+ people.

Hell, there are some LGBTQ+ folks who realise their own sexuality(ies), romantic orientation(s) and gender(s) at any point in life from typically heterosexual hentai, yuri (women loving women content), and/or yaoi (men loving men content) in anime fandoms and/or sometimes from non-anime fandoms (i.e., K-Pop [borrows heavily from hip-hop and from Black culture], J-Rock/Visual Kei, music fandoms, Five Nights at Freddy’s, Sonic the Hedgehog, some Nintendo-based franchises [Legend of Zelda, Fire Emblem, Metroid, Super Mario Brothers, Smash Brothers, and more], the horror genre and many genres of fiction and non-fiction, indie game fandoms such as Yume Nikki and Undertale/Deltarune, etc.), and those who think and speak in purity culture semantics and syntax typically refuse to understand better and instead label others as identities they are not.

Although I am mainly fine with influential people being “cancelled” or called out for their bigotry by marginalised communities who have a platform to continue to call out bigotry and discrimination from influential groups, brands and people when they see it, sometimes there is a moral perfectionist bandwagon of minimal mercy and minimal forgiveness folks can jump on when a random person who doesn’t know any better makes a mistake they have no intention of making and have not intended to harm anyone, and that can make a person feel like shit about themself as a human being and that can make them hesitant in learning to be a bit more better and to strive towards human decency (not perfectionism).

Anyways… I don’t want to get off topic of how I want to discuss how cancel culture does the exact opposite of its original intentions to call out discrimination, bigotry, fascism and ultra-conservative beliefs from influential people and from society because I plan on covering what I feel and think should be more covered here.

Before I can get why cancel culture (which may often be confused with ‘call-out’/accountability culture) is detrimental in social equity progress for both in-real-life and online social equity circles and in collective, political movements [no, not the postfeminist, self-help and self-love bullshit that is far from feminist and far from supporting marginalised communities while using antifeminist, perisex-centric and cisheteropatriarchal rhetoric that is oftentimes considered as “empowering” and “feminist” by a society that is too fucking scared of admitting that it and its own bullshit is already going in flames and shit still needs to be worked on and to happen outside of sometimes empty and meaningless discussions found in mainstream false feminist circles and in self-improvement circles], I must first infodump and explain its origins, how it is also a form of public shaming/humiliation and ex-communication, how people in Autistic communities (online and in-real-life) are harmed by it, how it’s used as a platform for marginalised communities of all intersectionalities to call out a society that has historically disadvantaged them and bigoted people in power (its good sides) and how it can quickly turn into a form of social exclusion/punishment, bullying, harassment (doxxing, suicide baiting, etc.) and abuse (its bad sides).

Without further ado, let’s get started.

Origins and how Cancel Culture is a form of public shaming/humiliation

Cancel culture (sometimes thought of as ‘call-out’/accountability culture) is a form of political boycotting, and is in reference to the ‘cancelling’ or removal of something or someone due to issues communities have over an offense done (Toler, 2022). Nevertheless, this isn’t always the case because it can be used in other ways of expecting people to adhere to rigid social and conformist norms. It’s also interchangeably used with ‘woke’ political rhetoric that’s tied to the emergence of #BlackLivesMatter protests in the 2010s. Both concepts of “wokeness” and “cancelling” are interconnected with collective demands from racialised and marginalised communities to hold systemically bigoted social systems accountable since those systems have harmed them for centuries and decades (in the form of police brutality, assaults, hate crimes, being injured, fatally wounded and attacked, being misgendered and deadnamed, being harassed and catcalled, raped, and in societal bigotry/discrimination). There are plenty of definitions on what cancel culture is, but there isn’t such a thing as an objective definition on what cancel culture actually is. To be cancelled in either a social or a semantic way can mean that a person or group of people made the conscious decision to revoke their support for something or for someone influential based on a perceived or a sincere offensive action.

There are no well-known origins on how the terms of “cancelling” and “calling out” came to be, but they have entered the social equity/justice lexicon and consequently, the mainstream lexicon at some point in human history. Cancel culture itself has many ties to Black Culture and also (at some instance) to LGBTQ+ culture.

Mayhaps (an archaic form of perhaps), the phrase itself originates from Your Love is Cancelled (1981) produced by Nile Rodgers (Romano, 2021). The first documented reference to the act of cancelling someone comes from New Jack City (1991) when Nino Brown (a character from the film) says “Cancel that [woman]. I’ll buy another one,” (Dudenhoefer, 2020) referring to his girlfriend’s disapproval of his violent and aggressive ways. Per contra (on the other hand), the origin of cancel culture itself also ironically originated as a form of sexist humour utilised in response to sexist attitudes and/or behaviours.

In the early 2010s, there were fandom communities of various celebrities, idols and groups that started to publish posts on the internet, analysing and criticising flaws to ‘call them out’ on their behaviours and/or flaws.

Simultaneously around those earlier times, the word ‘cancel’ was often used as a way for a Black, LGBTQ+ person of the Black LGBTQ+ community to show their disapproval of another person’s actions (Toler, 2022), which wasn’t until later on that it involved boycotting someone politically. In the year 2010, Lil Wayne referenced Nino’s quote in his song I’m Single, but in 2014, this quote from New Jack City was referenced again in an episode of Love & Hip Hop: New York (2011) when Cisco Rosado (a member of the Love & Hip Hop: New York cast) told his love interest “you’re canceled”, which led to the term itself to gain popularity on social media. In the same year, the #BlackLivesMatter movement began to emerge after George Zimmerman was cleared of accountability for participating in the murder of Travyon Martin, leading it to becoming the well-known collectively global movement it is today. Approximately in 2016, National Football League (NFL) quarterback Colin Kaepernick was shit on by US former president Trump for kneeling before a football game commenced, which Kaepernick, himself, experienced the consequences stemming from him kneeling as an act of resistance in an overtly racist society, such as being banned from being in the NFL. Throughout 2017–2018, online posts beginning to call people out started to increase and became part of #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo movements, and in 2019, it was when the term ‘cancel culture’ became more known and moved into the mainstream where it went through normalisation, notwithstanding its inevitability of becoming a political concern (Schrader, 2021).

For centuries, Black and Indigenous communities and Communities of Colour spoke out against racial bigotry, police brutality, killings, residential schools and the torture of animals (i.e., dogs) sacred to Indigenous cultures in Turtle Island (North America), racial profiling, harassment, Indigenous children being placed into the often racist and colonialist foster system, and systemic bigotry. With social media’s presence, not only did attention on these issues begin to increase, but there was a shift in global recognition for the need to work towards change to combat both racism and colonialism since George Floyd’s death by police brutality in 2020. In this way, ‘cancel’ culture is another form of political boycotting, which began with the Irish in the 1880s, leading it to become a political tool in the 1960s by Black American individuals throughout the Civil Rights movement, including the Montgomery Bus boycott (was sparked by Rosa Parks when she refused to sit in the back of a bus that was segregated).

Per contra (on the other hand), cancel culture is also the online version of public humiliation and/or the non-religious version of ex-communication. Public humiliation itself is also one core element of cancel culture besides holding something or someone in power accountable for their actions towards marginalised communities. Back in the past, ‘cancelling’ referred to someone holding someone else accountable for awful acts they typically did due to the position of power someone is in.

For example, Harvey Weinstein, a well-known convicted sex offender who committed sexually abusive crimes and was sentenced to 23 years in jail, and how #MeToo began to be amplified because many survivors and victims of sexual violence are coming forward, shifting the way we, as a society, talk about rape culture, sexual assault, and the way we treat people of all genders and/or gender modalities differently (by this, I am talking about gender and how we talk about sexual assault in real life and in online communities, and also about how people of binary genders from the fucked up gender binary are treated differently*) when it comes to survivors and victims of sexual violence.

*A/N: There is an article titled “Just Say No? The Use of Conversation Analysis in Developing a Feminist Perspective on Sexual Refusal” by Kitzinger and Frith (1999), and I feel like it ties in a lot to how we talk about strategies in preventing the instances of sexual assault instigations and how so-called ‘assertive training programs’ or ‘building confidence’ training programs pin the blame on both survivors and victims of sexual assault. There is also another article titled “Doing Feminist Conversation Analysis” by Kitzinger (2000) that also ties in with this as well because the work of fighting back against assault instances and rape culture isn’t over yet, and unless people stop utilising “empowerment” and “self-love” bullshit along with mixing them into assertive/confidence training programs, then nobody wins and everybody suffers.

At some point in life, it came into a decision that ‘cancel culture’ was now going to mean that any minimal/trivial critique of a person translated into a desire for destroying their life and to erase any trace of their existence from public consciousness.

By itself, public humiliation has always existed since human societies were first formed. Throughout history, both ex-communication and public humiliation have been used as a way to ensure others would socially conform to what is expected of them by the communities they lived in (Schrader, 2021), and also as a method to punish people for not conforming to what’s socially expected of them (as a reference to restrictive social norms designated to a person, depending on the community or social habitus [something that’s established through a mainly social process rather than an individual one that creates transferrable and lasting patterns from a single context to another, but this can shift in relevance to specific contexts and throughout time]). From the eras of the Middle Ages in Europe to Colonial America, public restraints known as ‘stocks’ were used by the predominantly Christian Puritans to punish those they deemed as “criminals”. Many other methods of public punishment such as tarring and feathering were also a form of corporal torture used to prevent people from straying away to the expected social rules often placed onto people by Christian Puritanical society in Medieval Europe and in Colonial America.

The detriment known as Cancel Culture and its harmful impact to online and in real life Autistic communities

I will begin this section with how Autistic communities are detrimentally affected by cancel culture itself, and how cancel culture can be utilised to threaten, poison, doxx and drive someone to end their life. It’s going to discuss heavy topics, so please bear with me, and if you cannot, that is okay too and your mental well-being is what matters (please skip this section if you’re not in a good place mentally and emotionally right now /caring /kind /looking out for you).

In regards to how Autism and/or being Autistic is perceived as either a disability (in the way that society disables Disabled and Neurodivergent communities because society is never made for anyone in the first place, and in a way that one’s disability and/or neurotype can interfere with day-to-day things [in a disability rights way and in a surface-level understanding of the Social Model of Disability, not the medicalising and moralising fuckery that able-bodied and neurotypical assholes often use to make themselves more “healthier”-than-thou /clarifying /genuine]), it depends on a person’s lived experiences and their own perspectives.

Autism being perceived as both a lifelong developmental condition (O’Leary, 2021) and as a natural neurotype can and do co-exist in the same way, since there are some Autistic folks that are proud of who they are as a person [which is a good thing], and there are some folks that aren’t always proud of being Autistic in a world that always hates the ways in which Autistic people live their lives as they are [which is completely understandable because society loves to fucking preach about self-help, “self-love’ and other self-improvement moralising bullshit for only themselves, yet when ND, Disabled and Autistic folks do it, they’re often infantilised, hate-crimed, dismissed and being called villainising shit, along with being attacked and injured and lots of shitty stuff that no one should ever be put through by this oftentimes ableist-as-fuck society that has failed its vulnerable people].

On the Internet, there are people who treat the Autism label as a “trend”, which harms self-diagnosed Autistic folks, people who are questioning whether or not they’re Autistic and Autistic folks who’ve been professionally diagnosed. People treating the Autistic neurotype and/or self as a “trend” will use it as a label to harm any person, and will use it to get away with ableism and with infantilising Autistic people. There are plenty of narrow-minded advocates (who claim to care about Autistic people but use poisonous positivity and positivity in general as a way to dismiss the often painful realities of being an Autistic person in an ableist society) who refuse to accept the fact that some Autistic people have more challenges than others do (O’Leary, 2021), while there are also some Autistic folks who need ‘around-the-clock’ care from their support persons and/or from health professionals who are experienced in providing Neurodivergent/Disability-affirming care and/or culturally sensitive care.

The narrow-minded Autism advocates (whom I’d rather refer to as puritanical pieces of shit for now) with limited or NT-centric perspectives on what it means to be Autistic refuse to accept any debilitating aspects of being Autistic nor want to have difficult, but necessary conversations about challenging and agonising aspects while disabling plenty of main elements of living as an Autistic person, which folks of all walks of life experience. Those puritanical pieces of shit use cancel culture as a way to censor realistic narratives of life as an Autistic person, consequentially leading to division in Autistic communities while instilling fear in genuine advocates, voices of people, parents of Autistic relatives and Autistic parents themselves while simultaneously threatening to doxx them, harass them, suicide bait them, and threatening to invade their privacy as well.

There are opinions from Autistic individuals in online and in-real-life communities that need to be discussed/talked about since we, as a community, need to collaborate with each other and to unite with each other to stand against continuous division.

Withal (in addition), puritanical pieces of shit refuse to allow unity in Autistic communities to happen since they believe that people with morals similar to theirs are the ones that “should” be listened to, whereas everyone else’s perspectives and opinions are to be ignored because they feel that everyone else’s opinions are “biased” and “full of shit” (this sentence alone can apply to TERFs, radfems and anti puritans in fandoms while they continue to divide online and real life LGBTQ+ communities with regurgitating conservative and alt-right points while claiming to care for the people they otherwise throw under the bus).

In elaborating further, individual voices and different perspectives on what it means to live in a neurotypical-centric world as an Autistic person become their targets as puritanical pieces of shit would do anything they can to discredit, defame, lie, and shift the accountability of their harmful actions to tear vital voices down in our Autistic communities. They would also gather internet mobs to perform “cancel”-style attacks while investing their time and battery into destroying their targets’ lives.

To further add on, narrow-minded puritanical pieces of shit would also go on to attack and discredit research projects that would improve the lives of Autistic persons while refusing to have consideration for the majority of Autistic people who need supports and medical necessities to survive. Ableist and extremist puritanical pieces of shit would weirdly equate research bettering Autistic livelihoods to eugenics since the Autistic neurotype will be continuously misunderstood if it weren’t for beneficial research that provides Autistic people with a better sense of independence and better healthcare that’s Neurodivergent/Disability-affirming and culturally sensitive for Autistic communities, including gender-affirming healthcare for Autistic LGBTQ+ folks.

There has been medical research that reduces suffering and prolongs Autistic lives, but ableist puritans clearly don’t believe so since they care less about people who suffer and people with serious conditions in Autistic communities because they utilise cancel culture to silence and instill the fear of one’s life being destroyed, for that there are some Autistic people that are being realistic about the debilitating aspects of being Autistic in a world where society and shitty people are actively trying to erase our existence as Autistic people and also because they have hatred over people they refuse to understand and listen to. There are plenty of Autistic people that have comorbid conditions such as epilepsy, eczema, scoliosis or kyphosis, hereditary thyroid issues [i.e., Hashimoto’s], cancer, and more comorbidities. Research into them has not only increased a person’s understanding of what it’s like to be Autistic and having comorbidities, but to plan on saving Autistic lives from misunderstanding and from hate crimes that has arisen from misunderstanding, but also from hatred of Autistic livelihood by neurotypical society. Without medical research increasing public understanding and social and medical support of Autistic people (no thanks to eugenicist and fascist self-proclaimed advocates that only give a fuck about themselves), no Autistic person would be safe, higher rates of mental illness and suicidal ideation for Autistic people will increase, and the world would become less livable and safer for Autistic people (O’Leary, 2021). Autistic folks would also be hate-crimed and would feel deeply unsafe and not protected every time they’d go outside without the help of research by sincerely supportive neurotypical people who actually care about our well-being including fellow Autistics who are researchers, and without additional research into our lives and the shit we have to deal with every fucking day.

Many so-called “advocates” never think about those who are suffering from oppression, bigotry, and from fascism because they only think of themselves and their own agenda, along with other puritanical bigoted fuckasses they’re loyal to. Many of them are against any beneficial research that provides support and inclusion for Autistic folks. Sure, research projects have a duty to be carried out in both an ethical and humanitarian manner, but even if they are, there will always be eugenicist fuckers that will still claim that research is a form of “eugenics” rather than admitting that they’re the ones using both syntax and semantics (in a linguistic manner to dress themselves up as ‘one of the good ones’) to deflect their own rhetoric while wrongfully placing blame on research projects that prove to be life-saving in the end.

The amount of paranoia they have can feel similar to moral panic from religious fundamentalists and from ultra-conservatives who use cancel culture to silence or threaten anyone attempting to expose them for the fearmongers they are. “Advocates” claim to be pro-choice and pro-abortion while also claiming that research projects benefitting Autistic people will lead to prenatal screening to prevent Autistic existence (in which, there isn’t a realistic premise within this kind of mental gymnastics… this logic isn’t based in real life, but in ableist beliefs of our existence as Autistic people). Eugenicists, otherwise known as some ‘advocates’, would also go to great lengths in threatening, harming, suicide baiting, harassing, dogpiling as well as doxxing anyone who calls them out on their ableist rhetoric and their own harm towards Autistic communities.

Despite cancel culture being used in a liberating way for many in speaking out against hatred and discrimination, it can also be used in harmful and corrupt ways in terms of punishing marginalised communities for small things that aren’t worth focusing on, such as people liking shows {with exceptions such as Harry Potter because it’s already made by a bigoted TERF anyway}.

Cancel culture can also say a lot about the social climate we are currently living in with the online world we’re increasingly inhabiting and how it also influences the current political and social climate (Dudenhoefer, 2020). This way of life is already becoming more of a reality by living on the internet since this decade (2020s). It’s also a time where there are news and/or information about ongoing crises from COVID-19, the humanitarian crisis in Yemen, the time of unrest for Ukrainian and Palestinian refugees and newcomers, rolling back the rights of LGBTQ+ folks, Disabled/Neurodivergent folks, and BIPOC folks all over the world (predominantly in both the UK and US) to a revival in social awareness and public knowledge around decade-long bigotry, within the amount of time covering the 2020 election and the January 6th (2021) Insurrection. People have also began to spend more time online as a result of increasing unrest and isolation.

Decent and Worse Sides of Cancel Culture

In this section, I am going to discuss the decent side of cancel culture and its worse side of it.

Cancel culture may be decent in some ways as I will state here. In some instances, it can provide an accessible platform for marginalised communities to be able to have. For example, an influential person causing harm can be held accountable for their actions and their words stated against marginalised communities they’re targeting. People and groups in power who typically deflect themselves from taking responsibility for pain they’ve caused would be exposed to the consequences resulting from their actions and words and face them.

The #MeToo movement is a real life example of how calling out privileged people in power leads to a cultural shift (Dudenhoefer, 2020) in the ways we have conversations about the nuances and complexities of instances of harassment, rape culture, consent, and the gendered ways we interact with people in terms of assertiveness and confidence training, notwithstanding the socially designated gender(s) a person performs in society. There’s also another example I will state about cancel culture in which it’s shown to actually do some good for the betterment of marginalised communities, and also can be a life lesson of what it truly means to be inclusive in social equity. Lizzo was called out on using the word ‘spaz’ in her song Grrrls, and she heard out Disabled folks who were holding her accountable for even putting the word in the song (Colombo, 2022).

She was more than willing the remove that word in her song, because if a well-known artist like Lizzo, Taylor Swift, or anyone famous were to use an ableist word (such as the ‘r’ slur), then there’s a chance that it can become normalised again and it can lead to many Disabled folks facing ableism again and the impact of ableist words will once again be trivialised. From Colombo’s (2022) experience with ableist words, the word ‘spaz’ “encapsulates all the “otherness” that was put on me as a child, and like the “r” slur, the word is rooted in ableism” (Colombo, 2022). Nevertheless, the assumption that calling out discriminatory actions on social media would actually bring change, because there’s not many peer-reviewed journals and research studies showing that it’s a form of useful, societal change in general.

For ableist words such as “spaz”, there’s a double meaning (semantically) that comes with it, even with dialects/variants of any language, such as AAVE (African American Vernacular English). There were also internet users sharing that Black Disabled individuals should be leading the conversation on language instead of white Disabled individuals who overly center themselves (Colombo, 2022) and don’t have the necessary context and nuance to understand that language isn’t as black and white as most people think.

In other ways, cancel culture may also be decent when talking about aspects of some shows that have morally grey complexities (as seen in animes such as Bleach, Naruto and Shippuden, Vampire Knight, Black Butler, Berserk, Akame ga Kill, and more). In fandom culture, some fans hold specific characters accountable for their actions because of the things characters have done and said that would be considered as an offense if characters were living, breathing, flesh and blood people in real life. There are also some fans that criticise harmful representation of characters, because some embody bigoted stereotypes of both racialised and marginalised communities (i.e., certain characters in the Harry Potter series such as Griphook, Cho Chang [her name, from what I think or from what I’ve seen on the Internet, is based off a specific racist anti-Asian slur, which I WILL NOT SAY because her name is a combination of two surnames], and Anthony Goldstein, and Kingsley Shacklebolt) in fiction. In some franchises such as Twilight, relationships between characters are understandably criticised because of age gaps and/or because of how detrimental relationships are portrayed with rose-tinted glasses. In this instance, cancel culture can be used in the way that call-out/accountability culture is used, but only calling out harmful actions for the right reasons, not for trivial reasons.

On the worse side of cancel culture, it can be referred as a draining way to simplify complex issues and allowing black-and-white judgments that can easily lead to harsh consequences in cases where the offense is less (Schrader, 2021) and/or where there isn’t a real offense, but a perceived offense over something trivial a person has disapproval of. This may also prevent meaningful exchanges of perspectives in online conversations or a grey investigation on what is actually happening outside of the Internet and inside it, especially in instances where this would be a plausible solution instead of humiliating and punishing someone over nonsensical matters.

Using social media in terms of cancelling someone doesn’t leave room for any flaws or vulnerability, or even for forgiveness, which can be just as difficult and as morally grey in subtle ways. It’s also dangerous because this involves harassing, abusing, bullying, threatening, and taking human lives. This danger of being in cancel culture, or being roped into involvement of it, is an additional issue the Internet has when it comes to discourse on social equity and many miscellaneous things (i.e., fandoms).

There’s also a decreasing capability to allow different interpretations of social equity and/or miscellaneous things in online posts and in forums. It’s also getting to a point where there’s no such thing as understanding different interpretations of something while creating shades of grey, including listening to someone. They’re becoming more like a memory of the past since people are shouting at each other because they think that their interpretation of something is the “objective” truth, which is far from helpful or beneficial.

Marginalised communities also address issues portrayed in mainstream media and entertainment, and in real life, while the buzz around “cancel culture” is a convenient way for people of many intersecting privileges (i.e., white/Western European, able-bodied, neurotypical/allistic, singlet, cisgender, perisex/non-intersex, heterosexual(romantic), etc.) to ensure that oppressed voices remain ignored or dismissed.

In order to effectively cancel a public figure (who turns out to be a bigot), it can be a lot more difficult to actually do it in practice, since doing that in a theoretical way is more manageable and may require some more researching or detective work to do (Romano, 2021). The idea of cancelling bigots is more easier to think about than performing the act of cancelling a bigot.

Many people have expressed their concerns about cancel culture itself. There are flesh and blood individuals in real life who are scared of being harmed by a social media mob that they end up censoring themselves out of fear of being threatened, punished, and humiliated off of the Internet.

Online, people calling for accountability on social media have a tendency to slide on the morality bandwagon in regards to delivering judgment and consequences (Romano, 2021) instead of hearing people out. All they’re doing is instilling a fundamentalist and religious holier or “healthier”-than-thou mindset into people with strategies such as fearmongering and demonising people who have nothing to do with what’s going on in reality and in online posts. Whenever there are individuals doing this, social punishments start to play out with a pitchfork-like mentality bent on inflicting agony, pain, and harm while simultaneously allowing zero room for change/growth, not showing any mercy, and withholding forgiveness because they refuse to consider that internet mobs aren’t always justified and can sometimes be proven to be unjustified.

Conclusion

To end off with why I think that cancel culture does plenty of harm and damage to people, it’s oftentimes based around a “healthier”-than-thou mindset of ongoing improvement to better yourself (in order for someone to reach a so-called ‘perfect’ self that doesn’t exist and never will) or you’re considered an Evil Person™, which is shitty to others and can bring feelings of inadequacy. There will always be some people out there who genuinely want to learn, while there are fucked up people who are predators (including TERFs because some TERFs have been fantasizing about controlling the bodies of children, non-binary people, transgender people, and intersex people while hiding behind their false concerns while they, themselves, out themselves as literal paedophiles with their control-based, sexual harassment, abuse and rape fantasies of trans children and women [who are WOMEN, not a dead gender trans women will never be, because… trans women are always… ALWAYS WOMEN /serious /sincere]), bigots, and bastards who think that they can get away with bigotry and abuse.

Said fucked up people are helped by cancel culture because cancel culture never actually thinks about going after the fucked up people instead of shitting on people who are trying to curate and create their own safe spaces online without being shit on just for even breathing and expressing their opinions.

In the same breath, those who love to shit on people for small things love to preach about mental health and people trying to manage the battles they have with their mental health/illness inside themselves to begin with, and also since those who actively shit on others play wellness mentor.

To those who shit on people while playing wellness mentor or being “healthier”-than-thou, I will tell you this:

Either pick a fucking side and actually give a shit about the mental health of others you’re worsening or leave people the fuck alone and kindly log the fuck off of social media, take a step back, and go outside because what you’re doing to random people on the internet is hurting and killing them for nothing.

References:

Colombo, C. (2022, June 15). Calling out Lizzo’s slur in ‘grrrls’ was not ‘cancel culture’. NBCNews.com. Retrieved July 17, 2022, from https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/calling-out-lizzo-slur-grrrls-not-cancel-culture-rcna33747

Dudenhoefer, N. (2020). Is cancel culture effective? how public shaming has changed. PEGASUS: The Magazine of the University of Central Florida. Retrieved July 17, 2022, from https://www.ucf.edu/pegasus/is-cancel-culture-effective/

Hassan, S. A. (2021, March 23). Why Cancel Culture By Anyone Is Harmful and Wrong. Psychology Today. Retrieved July 17, 2022, from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-mind/202103/why-cancel-culture-anyone-is-harmful-and-wrong

O’Leary, F. (2021, October 26). Cancel Culture and the Autistic Community. Fiona O’Leary. Retrieved July 17, 2022, from https://fionaolearyblog.wordpress.com/2021/10/26/cancel-culture-and-the-autistic-community/

Romano, A. (2021, May 5). The second wave of “cancel culture”. Vox. Retrieved July 17, 2022, from https://www.vox.com/22384308/cancel-culture-free-speech-accountability-debate

Toler, L. (2022, April 14). Cancel culture and its mental health effects. Verywell Mind. Retrieved July 17, 2022, from https://www.verywellmind.com/the-mental-health-effects-of-cancel-culture-5119201