Cancel Culture

Information presented in a court of law for the purpose of determining facts is subject to various rules of evidence. The opposing party has the opportunity to challenge this information and cross-examine the witnesses who provide it, allowing for debate and reasoned analysis. In the court of public opinion, however, the verdicts arrive before all the evidence. Moreover, in our modern society, the sentence is passed at the time of accusation. This phenomenon has been called “cancel culture,” and it is a direct threat to free speech and expression. In this lesson, we’ll examine cancel culture and how it is enabled by both ready access to information and the use of an effective digital Panopticon.

Threats from Individuals

In previous lessons, we considered privacy threats in which the threat actors were corporations or governments. However, individuals can also become threat actors using available personal information. For example, an ex-partner could use knowledge of a person’s social media accounts for stalking purposes. Identity thieves can use discovered or stolen information to pretend to be someone else. Both these examples are normally activities carried out by “lone wolf” individuals acting alone.

What happens when individuals act in concert to invade someone’s privacy? In one class of threat, suppose that a group of people otherwise unknown to each other in real life are interacting online in a forum or video game. One person does something to attract the ire of group, so the group does some investigative work and discovers that person’s real life identity, including personal information such as their home address. The irked members of the group post that person’s information online, resulting in a leak of personal data. This type of behavior is known as doxing.¹

Cancel Culture

A second type of behavior occurs when groups of individuals get together to try to discredit someone else who has an unpopular, or perhaps even vile, opinion and has shared that opinion via some channel that is eventually discovered. Upon discovery, a number of individuals react with strong negative emotions and decide to try to silence, punish, or otherwise harm the person who shared the original opinion. This behavior is known as canceling and has been directed against celebrities, companies, and even private individuals.²

In our broader society, canceling is not always viewed as a negative act. When a person shares an opinion that is racist or hateful, for example, a significant proportion of people agree with the concept of removing their platform or even punishing them for that expression. However, the tendency to cancel can be observed with any controversial subject, raising significant concerns about an individual’s effective right of free speech. Some people who agree with canceling others regard this effective suppression of hateful or otherwise hurtful speech as justified on the grounds of holding other people accountable for what they say. The relatively high level of social acceptance of this behavior has been dubbed cancel culture.³

The problems with cancel culture are twofold. First, the entire point of freedom of speech is that people have the right to say things with which other people disagree, even if the majority of people would find the content of the speech vile and repugnant. An explicit First Amendment right to free speech probably wouldn’t be necessary if everyone always agreed with what was said. Second, the mechanism behind cancel culture is a perfect example of a Panopticon. Everyone says something dumb now and then, but nobody can listen to everyone else all the time. Only a subset of the people who say vile things are ever “caught” and canceled. Furthermore, efforts to cancel people are not always successful, and a person recorded saying rather vile and inappropriate things can go on to become President.⁴

Notes and References