Americans and ‘Cancel Culture’

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

https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/05/19/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.


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.






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

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).


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.

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.



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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.


What is cancel culture?




How does cancel culture work?




How 'Cancel Culture' Works




The Consequences of Cancel Culture - A Different Lens




Let’s Reframe Cancel Culture | Sarah Jones | TED




 "Cancel Culture" Really a Threat To America?

Cancel culture blends into victim culture

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/02/16/cancel-culture-blends-into-victim-culture/

February 16, 2021 at 11:53 a.m. EST
One of the best encapsulations of the past few years of politics came from President Donald Trump about a month after he lost his reelection bid last year.

“We’re all victims,” he told an audience at a rally Dec. 5 in Georgia. “Everybody here, all these thousands of people here tonight, they’re all victims, every one of you.”

This sentiment was central to Trump’s appeal to many Republican voters. In the 2016 election, a sense that White Americans were losing out in modern society was a better predictor of support for Trump than economic disadvantages. Trump voters, more than anyone else, saw racism against Whites as a potent problem and were more likely to view Whites as victims of discrimination at rates similar to racial and ethnic minorities. Trump promised to make America great again — to wind back the clock to a time before things such as Black Lives Matter, to a time when the distributions of the rewards of American society weren’t questioned.

It’s hard to articulate this sentiment explicitly, though, particularly to a group of Americans who are at the same time hyping their profane indifference to feelings and hawking mugs to hold liberal tears. So it’s coded, packaged in other ways.

Such as the framing offered by Del. Kirk Cox (R-Va.), a candidate for governor in the state.

“There’s been so much silencing and shaming because of cancel culture. It’s gone too far,” he said in an ad released on Twitter. “We can’t even have a competition of ideas and for representative democracy to work, you have to have that. The left simply cannot be allowed to ignore other opinions. So I, as governor, will not stand for that.”

“Cancel culture,” as you may be aware, is an umbrella term for incidents in which people, usually public figures, have faced blowback for comments or actions, generally ones seen as culturally inappropriate. It’s a nebulous phrase, so your definition may vary, but it centers on the idea that some people have been “canceled,” exiled from society, for their views. (Those who were around in the 1990s will recognize this as a corollary to “political correctness.”)

Cox obviously sees this as a politically potent position to take, and that we’re mentioning it seems to bolster that idea. But so does a poll from HuffPost released Tuesday. Conducted by YouGov, it found that while only half the country was familiar with the term, the vast majority of Republicans familiar with it see “cancel culture” as a somewhat or very serious problem. Since a similar poll conducted in September, the percentage of Trump voters familiar with the term who say that “cancel culture” is a very serious problem increased by 14 percentage points.




If you’re seeking a Republican nomination, amplifying those concerns seems to be warranted. After all, concern about the issue is more potent among Republicans who are registered to vote (59 percent of whom say “cancel culture” is a very serious problem) than among those who aren’t (most of whom say it’s only a somewhat serious problem).

Important to our broader point is that Republicans say “cancel culture” is something threatening specifically to conservatives.




Eighty-one percent of Republicans familiar with the term who view “cancel culture” as a very serious problem say that conservatives are more likely to be negatively affected by it.

The reason is obvious. “Cancel culture” is a concept predicated on categorizing particular views as verboten, and those views are often ones that overlap with a sense that Whites and men are imperiled. This is by no means always true; some concern about “cancel culture” also derives from social media bans, which are frequently predicated on toxic behavior. But it’s often the case that the concern expressed as part of the backlash to the perceived phenomenon is the same concern that Trump expressed to applause during the first Republican primary debate in August 2015: His obnoxious comments about women were simply a mark that he wouldn’t be beholden to a “politically correct” worldview.

It’s easy to pick out examples of times that public backlash to comments has seemed excessive as a way to cast social ostracization as dangerous and snowballing. Sometimes these examples suffer from McDonald’s-coffee-lawsuit levels of misunderstanding the scale of the incident. Sometimes corporations wary of public-opinion firestorms have reacted more defensively than one would expect. Sometimes the crowd has simply been wrong and the backlash undeserved. Identifying examples of these categories is left as an exercise for the reader not to be derailed into ancillary debates.

But it is important to recognize the broader context for the movement. The emergence of Black Lives Matter in 2014 is in part a function of the ubiquity of smartphones, allowing people to document injustices that often happened in the shadows. That documentation spurred accountability and increased awareness. A newly visible culture of accountability expanded into broader and hazier questions of structural racism and sexism. The questions were always there; now, they have a larger and more receptive audience. So we get a backlash, manifested in concerns about the perceived oppression of Whites or other groups. In some cases, people who had largely avoided criticism were suddenly being criticized on unfamiliar terms.

Concern about “cancel culture” is an explicit manifestation of victimization by those who see themselves as a focus of questions about accountability and power. The message is that the cultural elites, including the media, are trying to silence opposing views. But it’s often a convenient claim, as when Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) parlayed the cancellation of a book deal into hours of media coverage centered on his plight — and a new book deal.

None of this is simple. That, too, is the point. Conflating all criticism into some Big-Brother-esque effort at silencing half the country is a facile approach to the moment. Which, of course, is why it’s appealing to political actors.

So You​’​ve Been Canceled (feat. Pnakotica)
from Melterweight by Gasoline Invertebrate




Cut the safety net and plunge head first into the deep end
A lifetime of achievement up and crumbled on a weekend
Hungry hippo me apart for a piece of the piety
Cash it in for credit at the secret society

Stepping on your face to elevate a virtue signal
Every orienting anchor point has slowly turned abysmal
What started as a trickle turned into a vortex
Clinging to the middle cannot save you ‘cause you’re next

So you’ve been canceled

No friends, no enemies, just NPCs
Execute commands programmatically
Extract bad actors operating out of frame
You only live by their rules when playing their game

from Melterweight, released October 18, 2024


Canceling is wrong no matter how bad the speech

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/10/13/hamas-israel-cancel-culture-students-speech/

October 13, 2023 at 3:28 p.m. EDT
For the better part of a decade, the academic left has been demanding that everyone else “read the room” before venturing an opinion about any controversial topic. Those who failed to do the reading on, say, race or gender could expect, at a minimum, a lot of shouting. If they were on campus, they often found themselves threatened with disciplinary action, including, for professors, possible termination of their employment.

This week, many folks on the left proved themselves to be functionally illiterate, room-wise.

When a terrorist operation indiscriminately slaughters innocent men, women and children and streams its atrocities on social media, this is usually seen as a moral horror. The people who commit these acts are normally considered bad guys — even if they have very legitimate grievances against the nation where their victims live, as I agree Palestinians do against the state of Israel.

No matter how just one’s cause, some tactics can never be legitimate.

If you’ve been on social media the past few days, you know how many folks in academia just couldn’t bring themselves to say this after Hamas went on a rampage against Israeli civilians. College administrators, usually good for a bracing dose of moral condemnation, issued curiously muted responses. Worse, some student groups suggested that the real blame for the rape of Israeli women and the murder of Israeli babies belonged to … the Israelis. An American Studies professor at Yale tweeted, “Settlers are not civilians. This is not hard.” The president of NYU Law’s Student Bar Association opened the group’s weekly newsletter with a cheery “Hi, y’all” before going on to declare that “Israel bears full responsibility for this tremendous loss of life.”

This triggered a backlash that was entirely predictable — except, I guess, to the authors of those missives. Furious alumni complained; hedge fund mogul Bill Ackman suggested that Harvard, his alma mater, should name the members of student groups that had signed on to a particularly noxious letter so that CEOs could avoid hiring them.Various folks obliged by doxxing group members. A law firm rescinded the NYU student’s job offer.

This was followed by some frantic backpedaling, as administrators belatedly remembered to mention that Hamas had committed atrocities. Some of the students and groups — including the NYU SBA — repudiated the sentiments that had been endorsed under their names.

Like most of you, I’m appalled by the idea that maybe terrorism is okay, if you target the right civilians. I’m mad at these people for saying awful, stupid things. I’m also mad that I now have to defend the worst of them from cancellation. Because make no mistake: What is being done, or at least attempted, is cancel culture, though I got a lot of pushback from conservatives when I said so on X, formerly known as Twitter.

These people were talking about war crimes, I was reminded. And, given their politics, they were likely to be themselves avid supporters of cancellation. You can’t expect us, conservatives said indignantly, to unilaterally disarm in the culture wars.

I take both points. But free speech is the cornerstone of our democracy, and free speech by definition requires protecting unpopular ideas. Since bad ideas are often unpopular, this will include protecting some bad ones — fighting them with good ideas, rather than threats.

Of course I understand why companies might be reluctant to hire students who think it’s okay to murder babies. But we must resist falling into the false binaries that distort the thinking of both the terrorists and the cancelers. The world is not neatly divided into good people who deserve protection and irredeemably bad people who deserve anything they get; it is full of complicated, flawed human beings who can often be better, with a little bit of grace. Many, maybe most, Irish Americans of a certain age have known otherwise decent people who nonetheless supported terrorism, emotionally or financially. We also witnessed many of those same folks repent after 9/11 drove home what terrorism actually means to its victims.

As this example suggests, the way to change minds is not through punishment. As your grandmother might have told you, “One convinced against his will is of the same opinion still.” It’s better to know what people believe so that you can argue them out of it, rather than to shame or harass them into silence.

Now, I do understand the strategic logic of what you might call “counter-cancellation”: trying to restore some balance between left and right by making it clear that two can play the cancellation game. But in this case, conservatives might be overestimating how unbalanced academia actually is. I asked my followers on X to send me their university communications about both the Hamas attack and earlier horrors such as the invasion of Ukraine. In some cases, the double standard was just as glaring as you might suspect. But in many other cases, presidents and deans were fast and forthright in condemning terrorism and laying blame where it belonged.

What’s more, as I’ve written in other contexts, while tit-for-tat has its uses, it also risks spiraling into a blood feud. And even if one is willing to take this risk, it’s unnecessary at this point. Yes, a lot of lefties demanded exquisite deference to their own feelings while assuming they retained the right to offend others as they pleased. But I suspect that by now they understand what they obviously did not before: that the room is a lot larger than their lecture halls, and they are not the only ones in it. They aren’t even the majority. So if they keep insisting that social media mobs be allowed to dole out vigilante justice, they are at least as likely to be its targets as its executioners.

Now is the time to show them a better way, modeling what tolerance and inclusion actually look like. Point out their errors, frequently and forcefully. Then leave it at that.