Cancel culture (disambiguation)

In the past several years a new and highly fraught term has emerged: "cancel culture". It has strongly negative, often viscerally polarizing, connotations, yet its precise meaning varies from person to person, with no single definition being accepted and many people questioning whether the term itself, and "cancellation" in general, is meaningful, valid, or worthy of concern. Adding to the confusion is the misuse of the term by various public figures. In this essay, I seek to correct this issue to the best of my abilities, by devising a useful definition for the term which covers several disparate, different phenomena that the term "cancel culture" has come to describe, but which explicitly excludes instances that are innocuous or irrelevant.

I propose the terms and definitions below. I have given examples for illustrative purposes, which should not be taken as remotely close to exhaustive or comprehensive in representation.

1. Canceling is when a group of people, in response to protected speech of a target individual, attempt to force or coerce others to impose artificial, non-speech consequences on them for said speech. By "artificial consequences" I specifically mean those which are not what would be socially acceptable or obligated to occur; in particular, forms of protest such as public demonstrations and the group in question changing economic behavior do not count. I propose three subtypes:
• Grievance cancellation involves cancellation over offense from some or all of the targeting group. Examples include evangelical Christian attempts to ban Rowling's novels over perceived Satanic/occult imagery and the attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo in response to the publication of a cartoon of Muhammad. Also included are attempts to socially isolate people perceived as being "problematic" for mere speech via harassment and coercion of them as well as those who associate with them. It should be noted that this last action, while often framed as productive in cases of bigotry, often backfires as it causes the target to become both more convinced of their beliefs being correct and to be more vulnerable to further radicalization by more extreme views.
• Pernicious cancellation involves cancellation in which harassment, threats, or other illegal activity are involved, as well as those in which unethical means are employed with their use justified in the targeter's view by the circumstances. The Charlie Hebdo bombings mentioned beforehand are a particularly pernicious example, as is the recent incident involving the beheading of a French teacher, but less pernicious forms, such as doxxing or sending death threats, are also common, with Internet-based forms of this having become increasingly common in recent years, ranging from harassment of a fruit fly researcher by animal rights activists in response to a public statement to mass flagging campaigns and false DMCA claims conducted on Twitter and YouTube by the flat earth movement in an effort to silence debunkers.
• Malicious cancellation is even more concerning, as it is a particularly disturbing form of online harassment. Here the cancellation is started for reasons other than mere grievance. The motive may be malice against the target, a desire for clout or attention which the targeter expects to receive, a desire to be perceived as virtuous, or even a sadistic desire to ruin lives in general; in this case, the reason for targeting the target may be irrelevant or even fabricated, as the real goal is elsewhere and any offense of the canceler is feigned. As examples, one has many incidents involving Kiwi Farms, EssenceOfThought's harassment of various people on Twitter and other platforms, and efforts by various cults to discredit critics and ex-members by demanding they face consequences for fabricated offenses.
2. Pseudo-canceling is a general catch all term for things which, strictly speaking, are not covered by the definition of cancel culture I give below. Much of this activity is, from a societal perspective, benign or even beneficial. There are numerous general examples of things which should, in all right, not be part of the debate at all. A non-exhaustive list follows:
• Boycotting, where a group of people collectively decide not to support a business for political, social, or other reasons, does not count because the consequences (less money to the business) are not artificial: pissed off customers, given the option, will spend their money elsewhere.
• Criticism alone does not count, as receiving criticism is not a non-speech consequence. A large amount of hate mail or DMs does not count, though a corresponding number of death threats might.
• Genghis Khan's "cancellation" does not fall under the definition. The original Twitter thread was a single person being widely mocked for even proposing the idea of canceling a man who died over 700 years before Twitter was created, along with a small group of people (mostly ironically) agreeing with the idea. Similarly, while real instances of cancellation on Twitter are quite common, many "cancellations" on Twitter discussed in popular media are best described as jokes or mindless trends.
• Hawley's book deal being canceled in the wake of January 6, 2021 does not count, as this was a purely intra-corporate decision in response to potentially illegal actions on Hawley's part. As an aside, it should also be noted that Hawley was not censored either, as he is free to publish his book elsewhere, or even to self-publish or release online.
• Demands directly to an artist to change/censor art due to offense do not themselves count, as an artist can simply ignore these when there is no party forcing them to do otherwise. While often classified as such, cases where corporate entities cave to vocal online mobs to change art also do not count for the same reason, regardless of the motive and despite being worthy of serious discussion in and of themselves due to their effect. (Incidentally, a lot of this could be easily avoided if companies took stock of the relative size of internet petitions and Twitter pile-ons, or stopped to check if the people making said complaint are actually fans or consumers of the art.) On the other hand, incidents involving the artist being coerced, harrassed, or threatened into doing so can count.
• Artists or their estates changing things of their own accord do not count, for the same reasons as above and for the additional reason that no social pressure is necessarily involved. The case of six Dr. Seuss books being withdrawn from publication may raise concerns about estate control over an author's work, but does not count as cancellation as there is evidence Seuss himself wanted to correct some of his work.
• Suspension or removal from a site or platform does not in general count, as a social media platform can freely remove people at its pleasure even when there is no push from others to do so. However, in cases where the presence of outside pressure or duplicity is the determining cause, such an act may fall under the label of canceling. Trump's removal from Twitter is a good non-example of cancellation, having been done by the company of its own accord and having been done in response to an arguable instance of incitement of violence, it does not fall under the definition of canceling.
3. Cancel culture denotes a general tendency in some culture to cancelling, particularly an abnormally large tolerance towards or usage thereof. It does not include tendencies towards pseudo-cancelling.