we need to cancel cancel culture.

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Cancel culture is damaging our society. It rewards premature judgments, prioritizes shame over accountability, and often oversimplifies issues with many layers. It also pushes us to vilify others to extinguish any opposing views. It’s like, no matter how complicated an issue is, there are only ever two options of where we can reside, and if we don’t agree with the popular side, then we’re canceled as well. GenZ needs to understand that cancel culture is not the answer or the solution to holding people accountable and needs to be persuaded to leave it alone.

A common example, is people finding say, the all-too-common resurfaced tweets from years ago. We love to act as if that’s all the person has ever said, has ever thought. And then it bleeds over to us: either we condemn everything that person has ever made, promoted, or is associated with, or we agree with and condone their potentially harmful statements or actions from long long ago. While the You’re Wrong About Podcast, brings up that “free speech is a right” because it’s not the Bill of “Privileges,” we as a society need to learn more productive ways of sharing our opinions with a tighter integration of morals an ethics. Because social media is the only way cancel culture is spread, calling it out on social media is the only way to try to change people’s minds.

This new normal of magnifying our worst moments and having that be our defining characteristic teaches us that if we ever do something wrong, then people will stop supporting us forever & immediately. People on the internet act as if we can never change our minds from something we said a week ago – let alone several years.

People are canceled for a reason. When someone commits a crime or promotes ideologies that can cause actual pain and suffering, they should have consequences. I mean, at its best, cancel culture allows marginalized people to seek accountability where the justice system fails and gives a voice to less powerful people. A community that unites for a common cause can be empowering and can make people think twice before posting potentially offensive thoughts and opinions. But at its worst, it ostracizes anyone for something as trivial as an out of context quote and can result in death threats and violent wishes to you and your family or the loss of your job or schooling.

Too often we jump to conclusions and decide strangers’ fates with little to no information. Yes, people lose their jobs or fans but often all they do is make one or two apologies before stepping slowly back into the public eye, and we forget their offenses ever happened, which is not productive. If people were only focused more on the root causes of these issues, and not just the symptoms, our society would be a much more forgiving and humble people because with a different set of circumstances and a different culture we could easily become the things that we dislike. Instead of recognizing that, we allow the hateful ideology behind cancellable offenses to exist unchecked by simply shaming the person instead of actually educating them on why their actions are hurtful.

As stated in Whitney Phillips and Ryan Millner’s Vice article, we need more ethics on the internet. As a society, we must find a way to expose and address important issues without causing contentious behavior from both sides. If people allowed eachother to make decisions for themselves about how to hold people accountable, then public punishments would be a lot more effective because “ethics mean taking full and unqualified responsibility for the things you choose to do and say.”

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