Has cancel culture gone too far?
Withholding support and shaming someone online for a public misstep started as a good way to hold power to account, but, as Rose Stokes finds, it not only shuts down meaningful debate, but ruins people’s lives
On Friday 21 February, Rishi Sunak, the new chancellor of the exchequer, posted a photo to his Twitter account in which he was making a cup of tea, using teabags from the clearly labelled Yorkshire Tea brand. The caption read: “Quick Budget prep break making tea for the team. Nothing like a good Yorkshire brew.” To the untrained eye, it was an innocuous enough tweet – British people love to drink tea, and the new finance minister was trying to connect with them – to be relatable. Unfortunately, for the Harrogate-based PR team of Bettys and Taylors, the parent company that owns the Yorkshire Tea label, the tweet was something much more – the flap of a butterfly wing that started a PR storm.
The social media avalanche was motivated by a misunderstanding: that this tweet was part of a sponsorship deal between the brand and Sunak – of the type we’ve become so accustomed to seeing on social media. But they were wrong. Within hours of the tweet, an angry mob of users were tweeting @YorkshireTea threatening to boycott the brand, using the tweet as evidence of its endorsement of the government and asking for verifications.
By the following Monday, the brand tweeted that it had been “a rough weekend” and appealed for users to “be kind” – and “remember there’s a human on the other end”.
This episode is by no means isolated and is another example of what has become commonly referred to as “cancel culture” – a phenomenon whereby large swathes of people abandon support for individuals, businesses or organisations as a result of a perceived misstep. This trend has grown more intense over the past decade, as social media has become more embedded in our lives, blurring the boundary between reality and fiction, and degrading the value of truth and fact. It is a trend in which many of us are guilty of participating, from “regular people” on Twitter to journalists with huge followings, celebrities and even the politician holding the highest office in the world’s largest economy.
The act of “cancelling” people has now become so normalised that it has earned its own definition in the Merriam-Webster dictionary: “To cancel someone (usually a celebrity or other well-known figure) means to stop giving support to that person ... The reason for cancellation can vary, but it usually is due to the person in question having expressed an objectionable opinion, or having conducted themselves in a way that is unacceptable.”
When it comes to its value in society, the votes are split. For many, the global power of the #MeToo movement and its ability to dislodge immoral, corrupt and – in the worst cases – criminal people from positions of authority and fame felt like a breath of fresh air. For centuries, rich and powerful people had run the world with relative impunity, and those with less influence who were unfortunate enough to find themselves mistreated by such people would be squashed and muzzled. Huge PR machines buried scandals, big companies bought people’s silence with non-disclosure agreements and, for a long time, this dynamic became accepted as the norm.
Then, Twitter came along in 2006 and changed all that. It gave a voice to the voiceless – or perhaps more accurately, it gave them a platform, a microphone and an audience primed to listen. The walls of thick insulation that previously protected powerful people began to crumble. The way that individuals had been able to communicate with powerful brands – and hold them to account – was completely turned on its head. We now had a “direct line” to the people we once admired or disliked from afar. This shift was small, but it changed everything.
When we deployed shame, we were utilising an immensely powerful tool. It was coercive, borderless, and increasing in speed and influence. Hierarchies were being levelled out. The silenced were getting a voice. It was like the democratisation of justice
In his 2015 book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, which examines a resurgence of public shaming – now fuelled by social media – author Jon Ronson speaks fondly about the early days of Twitter and “shamings” that really made a difference to people’s lives in a positive way. “These giants were being brought down by people that used to be powerless,” he says. “When we deployed shame, we were utilising an immensely powerful tool. It was coercive, borderless, and increasing in speed and influence. Hierarchies were being levelled out. The silenced were getting a voice. It was like the democratisation of justice.”
But, as we know, power corrupts, and what started as a broadly positive behaviour soon became something more malevolent – used to silence people and ruin lives. “Every day a new person emerges as a magnificent hero or a sickening villain,” Ronson says. “On Twitter, we make our own decisions about who deserves obliteration. We form our own consensus, and we aren’t being influenced by the criminal justice system or by the media. This makes us formidable.”
In other words, targets of shaming started to become more indiscriminate and as more and more people joined the main social media platforms, and this behaviour became more normalised, the power and influence of online mobs increased. In Ronson’s book, he references Justine Sacco, whose wholesale cancelling on Twitter is generally considered one of the first of its kind. She lost her job, her self-esteem and her reputation in the duration of a flight between New York and South Africa after publishing a tweet that was considered to be deeply racist. She quickly became the target of the scorn of millions of Twitter users. The scale of the shaming was immense, and became a cautionary tale for anyone using social media to not be offensive online.
There are numerous examples of powerful people who have deservedly been brought down with the help of social media since then, which must be a good thing. The #MeToo hashtag on Twitter enabled law enforcement officials to identify key witnesses in the sexual assault case of millionaire producer Harvey Weinstein, who was convicted last week.
The thing that hurts the most, is that you can now access hundreds and hundreds of negative articles based on misinformation just by putting my name into Google’s search engine and pressing ‘Enter’
But for people like Sacco, surely we need to ask some tough questions about the scale of the crime versus the scale of her punishment. “The problem is that the line between ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ or ‘worthy of shaming’ has become much less clearly demarcated in recent years,” Sam Espensen tells me. “Fact and opinion have become blurred in an era of fake news, and now whether or not someone deserves to be ‘cancelled’ seems to be much less important.”
Espensen found this out herself the hard way. Last May, after a quiet weekend at Bristol Spirit, the bar for her spirits brand, she was fed up. “We’re a small business,” she tells me. “We only have space for 26 people and so can only fit in a small amount of guests at a time.”
She started to notice a pattern: a significant amount of people were coming into the bar and just drinking tap water instead of buying anything. “I want to be clear, we provide tap water for any customer as soon as they sit down,” she says, “but it got to the stage where we’d have several seats taken up with people who weren’t spending money on food or drink in the bar.”
The problem is that all of her overheads were continuing to increase. “We pay the living wage and are proud to,” she says. “As people’s eating habits change, you need to cater to all dietary requirements. And not just food, but drinks – I encourage people to drink alcohol responsibly, so we have over 40 options of soft drinks available, but a rising number of people weren’t buying anything at all.”
One day in May last year, Espensen, a former journalist and PR consultant, had had enough, and wrote a post on her company’s Facebook page. “If you come to Bristol Spirit and you only drink free tap water – we will not make enough money to break even, let alone turn a profit.” She pressed send and got on with her day. Soon though, the backlight on her phone started blinking with the arrival of notifications; the post had started to get attention. On her way home three days later, she answered a phone call from an unknown number. “I hope you die you f***ing b****!” said the stranger on the line.
The story was picked up by local papers and soon became a national news story in most main papers and TV shows in a matter of days. “I soon became a ‘hipster bar owner who wanted to ban tap water’, which is not even close to being true,” she says. “The facts were skewed, and then skewed again. The coverage was insane – and global. I was getting 300-400 messages every day from complete strangers telling me at best that I didn’t deserve to be in business and at worst that I should die – it was completely overwhelming.”
“I felt so ashamed,” she continued, “I have complex post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD) and traumatic brain injuries, and so suffer with anxiety at the best of times,” she explains, “but this was another level. I was completely bombarded. As someone who has worked in PR and owns two businesses, I have a reasonably big online presence. At one point I counted that there were 13 different ways that people were telling me they hoped my business would fail – in the street, in email, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook. My name was in papers all over the world, the comments sections were a mess. I couldn’t escape.”
Public shaming is not new – ask Monica Lewinsky. As Ronson reminds us in his book, today’s Twitter pile-on really isn’t much of a departure from the days when people were put in the stocks or lashed in front of crowds. But social media and the internet have changed the nature of shaming. Before if you suffered a public humiliation, once it was over – despite bearing some emotional scars – you were able to move on with your life. “The thing that hurts the most,” Espensen says, is that “you can now access hundreds and hundreds of negative articles based on misinformation just by putting my name into Google’s search engine and pressing ‘Enter’”.
The problem is that the line between ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ or ‘worthy of shaming’ has become much less clearly demarcated in recent years. Fact and opinion have become blurred in an era of fake news, and now whether or not someone deserves to be ‘cancelled’ seems to be much less important
According to Ginger Gorman, journalist, cyberhate expert and author of the book Troll Hunting, “predator trolling targets often endure the wholesale destruction of their lives”. And not just that, but it’s easy to completely ambush someone these days. Before, a subject of public shame could at least melt back into relative anonymity by dropping out of social life for a while – and shutting their front door. These days, though, shaming can come at you from all directions – your phone, your computer, your friends, your colleagues, the papers you read and the TV shows you watch. “It’s death by a thousand cuts,” says Espensen.
“The internet allows us to connect to other like-minded people and to amplify our messages in unprecedented ways. This can be massively beneficial. But it can also do great harm,” Gorman warns. As someone who has also befallen a huge internet shaming, she thinks the big tech companies driving these social media platforms owe it to victims to do more. “The social media companies and platforms have created a town square where we’re coming to great harm,” she says. “Where is their corporate leadership?”
When contacted, Twitter’s communications team provided information on the platform’s online safety initiatives, which are enabling it to pick up more incidences of abuse than ever before – and do something about it.
But is it enough? Gorman doesn’t think so. “It doesn’t suit their revenue model to fix cyberhate because when there is a cyberhate event and people pile on, the platforms make more money.”
“Things happen very quickly on the internet,” Professor Stephen Palmer, a psychologist who specialises in stress management, tells me. He says “the power of the hashtag” makes it easier for big groups to turn against people. For him, a lack of self-esteem is usually present in those who partake in large-scale episodes of cancelling or trolling. “If someone is lacking self-esteem they might make themselves feel better by downing somebody else in a negative way,” he says. None of this is new, of course, we’ve all seen the narrative of the bullied person who becomes the bully – as Ronson says in his book: “We tend to love nothing more than to declare other people insane.”
But Professor Palmer says what’s different now is the propensity of people to “globally label someone” based on a singular behaviour or action. This is a dangerous way of thinking in two ways, he believes. For one, it’s unfair on the subject of the shaming, whose reputation can become irrevocably tarnished by the event, like Espensen. “Even good people have transgressions,” he says, “and these days apologising for mistakes you may have made in the past (when you may have been less aware as a person) doesn’t always seem to be enough.” But also, it feeds into a binary way of thinking even for those not directly involved: “We know that all-or-nothing thinking and absolutism can cause problems with people’s mental health, often resulting in feelings of hopelessness,” he tells me. “The precedent that this sort of shaming sets is that you can make one mistake and be labelled as a complete and utter failure, which goes against everything we teach patients in therapy.”
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Cancelling doesn’t always work, either. The recent conviction of Harvey Weinstein, a millionaire producer who was one of the biggest names to emerge in the early days of the #MeToo movement, is possibly more the exception rather than the rule. The comedian Louis CK is a good example of someone who has been cancelled on Twitter after multiple accusations of sexual misconduct against him emerged. He apologised publicly and later returned to business as usual.
The Kardashian sisters, too, have been embroiled in numerous scandals on Instagram, relating to their promotion of diet culture, or in the case of Kim, for the regular appropriation of other cultures, which have earned them much scorn online. And yet they have bounced back from such scandals relatively unscathed, managing to contain any broader impact on their overall earnings. These examples are all evidence of how social media bubbles are often out of alignment with real life in terms of the representation of such scandals – which often appear to mean more online than they do to the average person on the street.
The same cannot be said of ordinary people, who perhaps don’t have the necessary resources or clout to weather a social media storm. For them, bouncing back is much harder. Eventually, the tide turned for Espensen, but the experience left a deep scar. “I worked in crisis communications, and I feel grateful for some of the training I’ve received, but nothing could have prepared me for that. People tell you not to look at the internet – ‘don’t read it,’ they say – but it’s not that simple when it’s coming at you from all angles.”
Part of the problem lies in the hands of celebrity culture, too, which loves nothing more than to create heroes and villains of people – and, of course, the media must take some responsibility. Our fascination as a society with building people into visions of perfection and then hungrily watching their demise has been amplified in modern culture, fuelled by the internet. And yet, we don’t seem to change. An excerpt from The School of Life blog, run by the organisation founded by philosopher Alain de Botton, summarises this point astutely: “Every new famous person who disintegrates, breaks down in public or loses their mind is judged in isolation, rather than being interpreted as a victim of an inevitable pattern within the pathology of fame.”
But cancel culture has a much greater impact than just the personal implications for the individuals caught up in each scandal. The normalisation of a binary way of thinking towards analysing events has also seeped into the way we understand the world around us – and has coloured the way we enter into debates with those of opposing views. This has also been exacerbated by Twitter’s requirement that we squeeze our thinking into 140 characters, which often robs people’s opinions of important nuance.
In the UK, this was evident in the general election campaign in 2019, which saw left-leaning voters within the Labour Party with broadly the same views arguing fiercely among themselves and telling each other to “go and join the Tories”. Gorman finds this particularly problematic. “It’s interesting how the policing of discourse is often done by people on the left about others on the left,” she says, “and ironically this impedes free speech and the sharing of ideas.” She continues: “It’s like being left-wing is a package deal, and if you don’t subscribe to all the mandated values – or you question those values or trip up somewhere – you get cancelled.”
The culture of cancelling certainly does seem to be leading to a dangerous absence of reasoned discourse and debate, which we know from numerous incidents in history is the best way to educate and inform – thereby sustaining a peaceful and productive society. It also helps us as individuals to challenge our own viewpoint and strengthen our reasoning. In the current global political environment, listening to and interacting with those holding opposing opinions is more important than ever. But as cancel culture continues to become normalised, it’s hard to imagine a future in which debate and difference of thought are celebrated, and where compromise is something to value. For Gorman, we all play a role in feeding cancel culture. “Ask yourself this question: is your tweet or comment really serving to make society better and fairer?”
For those who simply want to survive online, author of Reasons to Stay Alive Matt Haig recently tweeted some advice: “Things you learn on Twitter: you have no control over who people think you are. So don’t worry about it. If they want to hate some fictional version of you that exists in their mind let them. Don’t exhaust yourself winning over people you can’t win over.”
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