Canceling is a good thing. People should be held to account for their actions. Further, people should be willing to take responsibility for their actions.
"Being held to account" is only meaningful if the ones holding you to account are doing so in good faith, and via a semblance of rationality.
Why not? How much time and effort have to go in to recognizing shitty behavior (cat calling, brown face, jerking off in front of someone without consent, etc)?
Besides, if they have such a short attention span, they can't cancel anyone -- canceling only works if you keep shunning them for a long period of time.
Arguably, the root cause lies with the employer that fires them or landlord that evicts them, but it take a lot of integrity to stand up to a large angry mob filled with ignorant and self-righteous anger.
If you watch the full, unedited video it's actually very easy to see the situation was far more complex than the media portrayed it to be: A crowd of young kids wearing Trump hats (distateful to say the least, and a powderkeg of a situation), some _actual_ black supremacists (the Black Israelites) spouting off some real hate, and a smaller group of indigenous protesters. This was a recipe for bad interactions, but in reality the kid (Nicholas Sandmann) that got all the online hate appeared to be trying to keep the peace (getting his friend to stop doing the tomahawk chop), and was confronted somewhat aggressively by a grown adult (Nathan Phillips).
There's more nuance to be had of course (and those kids should not have been there, wow!), but the media got it completely backwards based on some very creative editing apparently to support a given narrative.
Cancel culture in this case turned the mob against that kid. With little to no understanding of the actual situation, and based only on the most superficial stereotypes (red trump hat, conservative, probably doesn't like indigenous people, etc). I'll admit even I fell for that trap before I watched the whole video. It is simply unfair and inappropriate to target a CHILD who happened to get caught up in this crazyness. We have a young offenders act in my country for exactly this reason. And the amount of hate he got was incredible.
So yes, cancel culture has, does, and will continue to make mistakes. "How much time and effort" should you go to to not ruin an innocent person's life?
I don't know, but you should at the very least make an effort to get informed on the situation via multiple sources before you break out the daggers. And be aware that you're being fed a diet of what is often corporate misinformation.
canceling is a label applied to play the victim when people are being held accountable for things they don't want to be or by people they don't consider equal.
What word should we use instead then?
What word is suitable to describe low-context, online-mob-driven pile-ons / denunciations?
(Perhaps you’ve never seen that happen?—that would be remarkable.)
The problem, as usual, being that you are trying to describe something with a term where the common usage is just plain bad faith.
Unfairly attacked?
Harassed?
There’s lots of words…the common usage of cancelling is none of them nor what you described. The common usage is what no one in this thread seems to want to admit. And it’s why the same people who cry about cancel culture want to use it’s supposed existence as a reason to actually restrict others free speech.
But I think I see your point. It's a phrase that can be used lazily and in bad faith and itself contribute to degraded discourse.
It’s important to note that there is a significant portion of the people employing this term in bad faith who are doing now intentionally and to cause confusion. The problem with a new term is that it will, almost inherently, be co-opted by these same groups.
The attempts to mislabel are intentional and coordinated. I think you are coming from a good hearted place, and it’s nice to be able to have this convo, but a new label won’t fix it because the label isn’t the problem the use is.
Man you're just coming out swinging.
Remember when a scientist was cancelled over a shirt? On a day of greatest achievement of his professional life? We remember.
Justine Sacco was definitely canceled, in exactly the way you are denying happens. There is a legitimate discussion to be had on the phenomenon, and it can't be hand-waved away by claiming it's completely legitimate. Clearly it's not.
The fact that real things happen doesn’t make using the same term to describe not real things happening acceptable.
I can’t call out of work because there was a blizzard if there wasn’t a blizzard recently where I actually live
Cancel culture is a real thing. It's a new thing enabled by the structure of the systems we've only just created. I think a label is justified (even if this one kind of sucks). And of course concept creep will find this label weaponized almost as soon as it's been created.
That's kind of the era we live in: bad faith abuse of language by the extremists on all sides.
Not sure where your 'rule of elites' angle into play here, good faith and rationality are things that are debated and roughly agreed upon within societies and institutions (perhaps I do agree with your statement "These are emergent properties that come from free speech"). My point(s) were explicitly that: - Cancellation often happens with ill intent from bad actors: partisan, one sided policies that don't apply to 'their side'. You'll see little in the way of due process, benefit of the doubt / chairitable intepretation. - That combined with reactionism and little desire to combat base stereotypes, makes an easily weaponizable army.
I found Jonathan Haidt's description of cancel culture to be on the mark. It's all about intimidation: Not just for the one being cancelled, but of everyone else who's watching. It's a prelude to a wave of self-censorship.
He got banned from all Academy events for 10 years
Anything legal should be allowed, this already excludes 95% of cancel targets. For the rare illegal 5%, only the courts and public authorities should be allowed to investigate and administer punishment.