Last month’s article on cancel culture remarked on the freedom we as individuals have to speak out for differences in opinions. As an extension to this, the issue of cancel culture on an online platform is more complex, and it seems important to question, analyze, and perhaps reconsider the purpose of “canceling” someone online. Some argue that canceling is a necessary action to put those who have stepped out of the societal line back in their place; but so far, it seems its execution online was flawed from the very beginning.

Take Twitter as an example. It’s easy to see a crowd of users rile up against a public figure almost every day for either their current actions or things they’ve done in the past. Although some offenses are quite serious, like influencers accused and proved to be guilty of grooming their fans, others seem to get blown out of proportion simply because the “movement” of canceling went viral. As a Twitter thread grows like a rolling snowball, more users latch on — some even without a personal reason. Those who decide to stay away from the “movement” are considered supporters of the defendant to awfully many. Although fitting in and following the crowd are primal survival instincts, as intelligent species, it is important for us to take a moment to think about whether or not we want to be part of the snowball in the first place.

The snowball, even if originally meant to be a small projectile aimed at an individual in the wrong place, can rapidly turn into an avalanche that will drown countless others. Of course, this may be necessary if there is a large network of people standing behind a wrongful action, but in most cases where the “crime” can't be concretely defined, almost anyone can become one of the targets — and that is the issue. When one person is under fire for a relatively minor social offense, those connected to them can get accused of supporting them, and this cycle can always continue in any arbitrary direction because, obviously, everyone has skeletons in their closets that luckily nobody has found just yet.

That’s why mediation and balance are key to any governing system, which is what “cancel culture” seems to aspire to become nowadays. Some might argue that social media’s purpose is to be ungoverned and decentralized to allow for true execution of freedom of speech, but if cancel culture is to persevere, a just and unshakeable system must also inevitably be present. There must be rules if there are to be punishments, online being no different from the real world. These rules must apply to everyone unconditionally, and those who enforce them shouldn’t be selective to just the loudest of offenses that randomly become viral. As for the jury — in this case the entire internet involved — it might be very easy to get carried away with a specific case, thus either turning a blind eye to more severe offenses that somehow slipped everyone’s attention or getting caught up in their own hypocrisy and casting an overkill “ban sentence” on someone who deserves less. 

We often see that punishment is purely determined by the scale of the public outcry and the jury who are almost always represented by a biased collection of users with a one-sided view of the story. At times, even the jury may be guilty of the same misconduct. All this seems to happen due to the lack of clear legislation, and when the same users then become the enforcers of internet law and the overruling judges, the problem persists. This is not to discredit the whole idea of cancel culture; cancel culture allows people to voice opposing views and actually did some good by ridding the internet of a number of dangerous offenders. But at its current state, cancel culture seems like a child’s attempt to play law and order, only with real repercussions for its subjects, whether truly guilty or not.

As of now, “cancel culture” itself is a seed of a single governing branch that fully contradicts the purpose of the internet. The seed grows day by day as users learn to exploit the power of numbers to pressure individuals and organizations, but the truth is, it cannot and should not function without the legislative and executive branches if it truly seeks justice. Cancel culture needs urgent change and it should not be a carbon copy of the real world, although it should follow the same purpose — re-education and isolation of criminals from society to reduce their negative influence. And justice should be sought by the book. “Which book?” — one may ask. Well, it is yet to be written.