Do you think Harvey Weinstein, Matt Lauer, or Kevin Spacey should have been cancelled?
I agree that it's overboard on a lot of things, especially in the past couple years, but I think it's important to remember the "cancel culture" started as a way to hold certain people to account who were exhibiting socially unacceptable behavior, but were not being socially punished.
All societies have social norms, and all societies have informal (i.e. not through the legal system) means of enforcing those norms. There was a pretty significant gap in U.S. society's ability to enforce social norms against certain types of people, and social media filled that gap.
Now some people have taken that tool farther than can reasonably be justified, but the best way to fight back against that excess is not to say "cancel culture is oppression!" because it DID fill a need in our society, it DID punish people who deserved to be punished, and I don't think we can get the cat back in the bag. So, don't fight the tool, fight the people using it where it isn't justified.
(Who gets to decide when it's "justified" you ask? Well, we do. As a society. Together, online. We're going to have to figure it out. But if we go into a discussion about cancel culture assuming the other side is only interested in opression, repression, and censorship, it's not going to go well.)
Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey were literally charged with crimes, and Matt Lauer probably could be. There is no reason in theory that the criminal justice system couldn't handle the cases you brought up. Whether we need Twitter in practice to hold the justice system accountable is another can of worms, but there's a huge difference between calling out criminals that slipped through the cracks and calling out people that did random things we've now decided should be punished despite having no formal process in existence to do so.
I think people are way too impatient honestly. There will be things we will realize should be illegal, there will also be things we think we realized should be illegal but then turn out to be horribly wrong about. If people want next day enforcement there will be a lot of damage caused by these latter cases. I'd much rather a few assholes get off while we work out the proper way to enforce something (if at all).
The problem with allowing the people as a completely unmoderated mob to decide things is twofold - group dynamics make people utterly irrational, and there is little way to hold someone accountable if they falsely set off a mob. There would need to be some sort of anonymous voting function if we wanted to combat the former. For the latter, how about we introduce a formal mechanism for suing a Tweeter for slander?
I never said that criminal prosecution is the only way there can be repercussions, it was just the obvious factor in the examples OP gave. Aside from civil prosecution, it is perfectly reasonable for companies, schools, etc. to enforce their own rules - so long as they are made clear from the outset and enforced as evenly as possible across the applicable population. The problem with social media justice is how unpredictably it is enforced, which is part of the problem I was describing where we can't just make things retroactively illegal at the drop of a hat. "Illegal" extending to actions that are forbidden by an organization for example, not just the US government.
Mobs on Twitter absolutely do decide things. Yes, a company or school or whatever has to be kowtowing to said mob for there to be "real life" consequences, but in a number of cases the mob has absolutely acted as the jury. This is something that OP was literally praising.
Whoa, try reading my comment a little more generously, please. I specifically said the current iteration of cancel culture is going overboard. I was not praising cancel culture.
My main point was that cancel culture arose because of a real gap in our society's ability to handle certain types of people doing certain types of awful things... you mentioned that a lot of it could be handled by the legal system, but the reality was, it wasn't.
Weinstein wasn't charged until after he was cancelled. Same with Spacey. Lauer has never been charged. Epstein had been hit with some stuff, but basically let off with a slap on the wrist.R. Kelly had been acquitted before, and was basically unpunished.
All of these people's actions were (1) well-known in their communities ("open secrets"), (2) ongoing, and (3) not punished by any of the traditional institutions of society. Given that reality, and a global communications network where anyone can share their story, how could cancel culture not arise?
If I was praising anything, I was praising the fact that real abusers who operated with impunity for years were finally getting told to just stay home. Because other than Weinstein, that's basically all that happened.
Now, cancel culture being wielded against people like in TFA, that's way overboard, it's counterproductive, and people should stop it. But I think that's something we're going to have to solve as a society, through social discourse, not with government regulation.
Yeah sorry, I know you were saying it has gone overboard, I didn't mean to present your comment as praising cancel culture in its entirety. But I did read it as praising some aspects of what these mobs can do, which the person I was replying to claimed wasn't a thing at all. More to your point, I get that there have been some positive applications, but I'm just not sure it is possible to avoid much of the bad (which IMO outweighs the good). At least not without fundamental changes to how the call outs are currently done.
> I get that there have been some positive applications, but I'm just not sure it is possible to avoid much of the bad (which IMO outweighs the good)
If people could just grant everything else and get right down to this point, the discourse on this issue would be so much more useful and interesting. And much harder. Thank you for a thoughtful comment.
I agree that it's overboard on a lot of things, especially in the past couple years, but I think it's important to remember the "cancel culture" started as a way to hold certain people to account who were exhibiting socially unacceptable behavior, but were not being socially punished.
All societies have social norms, and all societies have informal (i.e. not through the legal system) means of enforcing those norms. There was a pretty significant gap in U.S. society's ability to enforce social norms against certain types of people, and social media filled that gap.
Now some people have taken that tool farther than can reasonably be justified, but the best way to fight back against that excess is not to say "cancel culture is oppression!" because it DID fill a need in our society, it DID punish people who deserved to be punished, and I don't think we can get the cat back in the bag. So, don't fight the tool, fight the people using it where it isn't justified.
(Who gets to decide when it's "justified" you ask? Well, we do. As a society. Together, online. We're going to have to figure it out. But if we go into a discussion about cancel culture assuming the other side is only interested in opression, repression, and censorship, it's not going to go well.)