The Cancel Culture Debate

Written by Luke Barnes

Hey everyone, this piece will be slightly different than my normal fare and will be more in the vein of the old blog I used to run or a few of my other posts, on this site, where I share my feelings on a particular issue.

Of course I am going right in at the deep end and am writing about cancel culture.

I can’t tell you the amount of times I see people complaining about cancel culture any time I go on any, social media platform these days, honestly it is boring, so I thought I would write a piece about my thoughts on the issue and whether I think it is a good thing or a bad thing.

Well first off, the issue is far more complex that good and bad and strays frequently into grey areas. Yes, people are allowed to say what they like under free speech, but if you actually look up those laws/ rules there are actually quite strict exceptions within them. Moreover, private companies can do what they like as you are choosing to use their service and have agreed to a TOS.

Furthermore, though people may be entitled to their opinions and the right to express them, it does not mean that they are free of the consequences of their actions. As the saying goes you can’t have your cake and eat it, you can’t have, an often-bigoted, opinion and then complain when people don’t like it, by the same logic used to justify you being allowed to say what you want, they can call you out.

Now cancelling itself is a rather simplistic term and can be easily misused. There have been many times when people innocent of what they are being accused of, have been harassed and attacked on social media sometimes to the point of suicide- without the accusers having a shred of evidence. In those cases we need to take a look at what we have become and question the value of the mob on social media.

Writing this I can only think one thing, maybe social media itself is the problem. The internet has made the world hyper connected and everyone can interact now, but maybe that isn’t a good thing. Both sides of this debate have said and done bad things, things that have had a negative impact on this world, and neither can be seen as in the right. Not to sound too much like an old person who doesn’t like technology, but maybe if we all just put our phones down and focused on our own lives things would be better.

An argument can be made that those that are ‘cancelled’ in some cases feed off the attention and use it to further their own aims, so by fueling them with your online outrage you are only helping those you intended to deplatform.

Ultimately, to not put too fine a point on it, when it comes to cancel culture there really aren’t any winners, those who do wrong should face more than the internet mob, they should face actual legal charges something far scarier. We as a society are becoming ever more divided, and this is just further proof of that, the internet and social media has just become a beckon for rage and hate.

Maybe it is time to unplug?