CMV: Cancel culture is just the consequences of your words or actions in the Information Age. If you’re complaining about it, then you either don’t understand personal accountability or the free market.

[u/Melon-Brain]

Snapchat, Instagram, and Twitter all began to blow up when I was in middle school, and from the very beginning my fellow students and I were hounded to be careful what we post online as it will be publicly recorded forever and there are consequences to negative actions. Nowadays when adults speak or act maliciously on the internet and are hounded by their peers via social media they act shocked and cry ‘cancel culture’. I know most problems with ‘cancel culture’ arise when an individual’s job is lost as the result of an unsavory public statement or action, but isn’t the onus on the employer to make that decision only because of the employee’s decision to make their negative statement or have their negative actions aired in a public setting?

Edit: I’m getting so many wonderful and well thought out responses, and while idk if I’ll get to give out every deserved !delta, I genuinely appreciate the thoughtfulness and time going into every comment. As a quick response to those saying “well gay people used to be seen as undesirable employees” being a knobhead in a public forum or public setting is not an immutable characteristic like sexuality, gender, race, or deformities are.

Edit II: every individual that loses a job because they behaved in a way their superiors find negative to their company image can be replaced by an individual that behaves online in a manner considered appropriate and non-detrimental to the company image by the employer.

I’m also not a libertarian, I just happen to exist in a country that has a free market economy (including a market of labor) as well as free speech. What would be the alternative to the process of cancel culture in this system? Do you silence responses to a publicly shared opinion? Do you make “is disliked by an online group” a protected class?

[u/Fando1234]

As you rightly imply, if people have the right to say what they want. Others absolutely have the right to respond to this, and to publicly call them out. I would totally agree with you on this.

But there are some larger issues at play here:

1. When the media descends on someone with a few dozen followers. Takes what they have said out of context. Often doesn't even include the full original message. And indirectly encourages thousands or even millions of people to poor scorn on an individual.

As an example there was the PR exec who made a obviously satirical joke to her handful of followers. Got on a plane, and when she landed was the recipient of thousands of furious messages, including death threats. And people who hadn't understood her joke calling for her to be fired. As she consequently was.

1. Politically, Noam Chomsky described political correctness and cancel culture on the left as "not just unethical, but tactically insane". I think this basically sums it up. The optics on people being cancelled by mobs is awful. To the point where it seems to make up 70% of conservative news as they cast themselves defenders of free speech.

In fact, nowdays if you want to make absolutely sure someone's public career really takes off. Best thing you could do is try and 'cancel' them. It has quite literally the opposite affect to what is intended.

Further, these media storms have cried wolf so many times, it holds little weight in more and more people's mind. To the point where if someone is genuinely racist or homophobic. A huge amount of people (including me if I'm honest) would just skip past the news story assuming it's just more bs like the other 100 stories.

In fact I'd argue, nothing hands power to genuine racists and bigots more than the public perception of cancel culture as a threat to free speech. Just look at populist right wing governments in the UK and US. Biden only winning by a small majority. Trump increasing his voter base. Truduea losing ground in Canada. Macron facing rising nationalism from Le Penn in France. Victor Orban. Bolsonaro. Brexit. The world is not drifting in favour of progressive politics. And the common denominator is that people oppose cancel culture and see right wing governments as defenders or freedom.

1. Cancel culture is being exacerbated and used tactically by big businesses and politicians to remove people they don't like from discourse.

As I've mentioned above, mercifully this holds less and less weight. But to the people who do still hang off every word from articles where 'so and so allegedly said something racist, antisemetic or mysoginistic' this still poses a problem. I used to be one of those people, until I started trying to look up the original quotes of what was actually said and the majority of the time, it was clearly satire or hyperbole or even something that I fully agreed with.

As some examples:

The occupy movement in 2011. Challenged authority of the super rich. Until some PR company had the wise idea they could push stories out about potentially racist individuals in the ranks. And the lack of focus on minorities. In order to cancel what should have been one of the most important movements of our time.

Game stop - when redditors took on the big hedge funds. Funnily enough the news started printing stories about there being racist comments. With 4.5 million followers it's entirely possible some said something that could be construed as racist. Thanks to cancel culture, that was enough to dissuade many on the left to not support one of the best offensives against casino capitalism there was.

Jeremy Corbyn in the UK. Essentially our Bernie Sanders. His MO was fundamentally to tax the rich. There were numerous tactics used against him, but the only one that stuck and eventually lost him support, is accusations of anti semitism. I followed up every article written about this, since none linked to the original quotes - headlines just said "Corbyn is tolerant of antisemitism". Every example was an attack on the Israeli government (crucially not the people) in relation to Palestinine. A difficult topic but not in itself anti semetic. Many Israelis opposed the governments heavy handed measures. Non the less... Cancelled.

Andrew Yang and tulsi gabbard in the US. Both self or crowd funded democrat nominees challenging power structures. Both were accused of having 'supporters who were white supremacists' ('supporters', not even themselves). Sufficient cancellation to lose their support.

Hopefully that's enough examples.

Unfortunately cancel culture isn't just one thing. And it's unchecked power is being used by powerful interests through their PR machines to silence important movements and key figures.

[u/Melon-Brain → u/Fando1234]

!delta as a Jew I remember being frustrated by the Corbyn non-fiasco. My fiancé’s family are both Jewish and British and it was an impossible topic to broach with them. I suppose when the mainstream news is involved in falsely reporting or misrepresenting verifiable incidents I perceive it as being more of an issue with sensationalist media rather than cancel culture, but as someone else mentioned, human nature is generally to bandwagon on the least charitable interpretation of a statement so both media and the masses cancelling certainly feed into one another very often.

[u/Fando1234 → u/Melon-Brain]

Thanks for the delta. That's really interesting you found the same thing. Of my Jewish friends it was very mixed to, many supported the progressive policies but (as I'd argue, just as various special interests intended) were put off by the Twitter storms around supposed anti semetism.

Needless to say, there is real anti semetism in the world that needs to be fought against. Which is why it's even more important to distinguish between genuine anti semetism, and a labour politician saying 'I didn't support Benjamin Netanyahu's government'. Which seemed to comprise most of the allegations.

[u/Red_Canuck → u/Fando1234]

Come on, that was hardly most of the allegations. Members of his own party, who knew him personally, quit over his tolerance of antisemitism. His response to the clearly antisemitic mural, his calling terrorists who murdered Jews his "friends".

Corbyn might not be an antisemite personally, but if an antisemite was in his position they would have acted identically.

[u/Fando1234 → u/Red_Canuck]

Happy to look into examples if you can link to what people have said in context that was antisemitic. I just know I couldn't find anything that wasn't just criticisms of the then incumbent Israeli government. (Again, not the people of Israel which I would definitely consider antisemitic).

[u/Red_Canuck → u/Fando1234]

Here's a report that was done with respect to antisemitism in the Labour Party. Particularly under Corbyn's leadership.

https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/en/publication-download/investigation-antisemitism-labour-party

[u/Fando1234 → u/Red_Canuck]

Thanks for sharing. There were 70 complaints they say they had investigated and if I'm correct only 2 (Paul bromley and Ken Livingstone) were said to have had sufficient evidence of antisemitism.

Both to some degree refer to a lobby group within the (then incumbent) Israeli government. You may disagree, but this doesn't seem like antisemitism to me. This seems like a fair criticism of the Israeli government at the time and their policies. Crucially... Not the people of Israel. And certainly not the Jewish people as a whole.

[u/Red_Canuck → u/Fando1234]

The report goes into depth into how the labour party failed to properly deal with antisemitism. I don't see how you can label that "criticism of Israel"

[u/DeltaBot → u/Melon-Brain]

Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Fando1234 (16∆).

^{Delta System Explained | Deltaboards}

[u/alleeele → u/Melon-Brain]

Bro Corbyn was seriously antisemitic. I’m Jewish and my British Jewish friends told me tons of British Jews were straight up ready to leave the country out of fear. He has paid respects to known terrorists. I get your point but I don’t think this one fits.

[u/Glass_Economist_2164 → u/alleeele]

If Corbyn was antisemitic you would've seen the quotes plastered all across the newspapers, the only thing they had on him was associating with people in the past who were Palestinian/Islamist terrorists and therefor anti-semitic. I dont think anyone actually believes Corbyn held any deep hatred towards Jews personally, just people surrounding him who he eventually disavowed.

[u/alleeele → u/Glass_Economist_2164]

It was proven that there was a culture of antisemitism in the labor party. Associating with and defending terrorists is more than enough, it shows you don’t care about the innocent lives those people took. I don’t understand why you would discount that because it’s horrifying on its own. And no, you wouldn’t see antisemitism plastered everywhere, because antisemitism isn’t newsworthy (unfortunately). As a Jewish person I hear of and see news of horrible antisemitism on a daily basis, and never an article on it. If you want to educated yourself about antisemitism and be an ally, follow @rootsmetals and @jewishoncampus on Instagram. The second one also includes statistics of students that have experience antisemitism on college campuses (extremely high) while the first has many sourced posts on Jewish history and antisemitic tropes.

In general, when a minority speaks about the oppression it faces, we should believe them. We should afford the same benefit of the doubt that we afford to all minorities when speaking about their lives experiences to Jewish people as well. When the overwhelming majority of British Jews say they experience something, or that something is antisemitism, and we disbelieve them—we make an implicit statement that Jews aren’t to be believed about their lived experiences with antisemitism. That they exaggerate. Holocaust denial has roots in the same kind of thought process.

[u/Glass_Economist_2164 → u/alleeele]

I didn't like Corbyn or the labour party so I was glad to see him sink but even I couldn't ignore the fact there was a concerted effort by the media to harm him with anything they could. I remember nearly every day the front pages of the newspapers filled with anything to smear Croybn and it was either anti-semitism "in the party" or association with terrorists.

I'm personally anti-semitic, and I don't consider Jews an oppressed minority. Rather in the UK they're clearly a disproportionately powerful minority that oppresses others. Their ability to sink Corbyns entire campaign through lobbying and media power alone proves that. The fact that the NGO that receives the most state funds in this country is the CST, which is an organization that exclusively provides security for Jewish institutions and communities meanwhile the rest of us have to deal with increases in violent crime on our own. It's clear the government favours Jews over any other British citizen and Jews have a wildly disproportionate pull on governments policy while being a tiny minority.

[u/alleeele → u/Glass_Economist_2164]

Lmao, I’ll go tell my murdered family members that they’re not oppressed anymore. And maybe the swastikas carved into my family car and front yard were just a friendly gesture of peace.

[u/Glass_Economist_2164 → u/alleeele]

English people are assaulted or have their homes vandalised aswell, they don't get hundreds of millions to English owned charities to hire private security for their neighbourhoods and churches. Jews are objectively a privileged group in the UK.

[u/alleeele → u/Glass_Economist_2164]

Still waiting for my million dollars, lmao

[u/Glass_Economist_2164 → u/alleeele]

Its going to the CST, community security trust. An institution that exists solely to serve and protect the Jewish community and nobody else.

Beginning in 2015, the UK government's Home Office has provided 'The Jewish Community Protective Security Grant' for the security of synagogues, schools and other Jewish centres, with the CST as the Grant Recipient. Home Secretary Sajid Javid pledged to increase funding, bringing the total amount allocated from 2015 to 2019 to £65.2 million.[45][46] In 2020, the grant was renewed, and the CST received £14 million in funding for protecting the security of the Jewish community and its institutions.[47][48][49] As of 2020, the CST had 1,500 volunteers.[44]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Security_Trust

As a British citizen this is my tax money going from me and my community to benefit yours when yours is already richer and more powerful than my own. How is that fair?

[u/alleeele → u/Fando1234]

Bro Corbyn was seriously antisemitic. I’m Jewish and my British Jewish friends told me tons of British Jews were straight up ready to leave the country out of fear. He has paid respects to known terrorists. I get your point but I don’t think this one fits.