We Need to Talk About How We 'Cancel' People — Because We're Getting It Wrong

Okay. I'm going to say some things here that are going to make certain people on both sides of this debate deeply uncomfortable, and I want to go on record saying: good. Discomfort is usually a sign you're getting close to something true.

Cancel culture. Two words that have somehow become a Rorschach test for your entire political identity. If you think it's a necessary tool for holding powerful people accountable, you're probably progressive. If you think it's mob mentality dressed up as activism, you're probably conservative. If you, like me, think it's both of those things depending on the situation, then congratulations — you've made yourself unpopular at every dinner party.

Let's actually dig into this.

What We Mean When We Say 'Cancel'

First, some definitional housekeeping, because the word is doing a lot of heavy lifting for a lot of different situations.

When R. Kelly was "canceled" — a process that culminated in his federal conviction and a 30-year prison sentence — that was the justice system working in conjunction with years of public pressure from Black women who had been ignored for decades. That is accountability. That is the system functioning, belatedly, the way it should.

When a random 19-year-old loses their part-time job because someone dug up a tweet they posted at 14 with a slur they no longer use and don't endorse — that is not accountability. That is a pile-on with no proportionality, no due process, and no actual interest in whether the person has grown.

Using the same word for both of those situations is intellectually lazy, and it's making it impossible to have a real conversation.

When Public Callouts Are Genuinely Necessary

I want to be really clear about something before I get into my criticisms, because I know how this kind of piece gets read: I am not here to defend abusers, bigots, or people in positions of power who use that power to harm others. Full stop.

Public pressure campaigns have accomplished things that the legal system and institutional HR departments demonstrably could not. The #MeToo movement didn't just "cancel" Harvey Weinstein — it shifted an entire cultural conversation about workplace sexual abuse and gave language and legitimacy to experiences millions of women had been told to minimize. Louis C.K.'s accusers had been trying to report his behavior through industry channels for years. It was public exposure that finally created consequences.

When institutions protect their own — and they almost always do — public accountability is sometimes the only lever available. I don't have a problem with that lever. I have a problem with how indiscriminately we use it.

The Proportionality Problem

Here's where I'm going to lose some of you, and I'm asking you to stay with me anyway.

The internet has a proportionality problem. A catastrophic one.

In 2021, a food blogger named Alison Roman got dragged across social media for comments she made about Marie Kondo and Chrissy Teigen in an interview. The pile-on was intense, fast, and completely disproportionate to the actual harm of two mildly snarky sentences in a profile piece. She lost brand partnerships. The discourse lasted weeks. People who had never heard of her before were suddenly deeply invested in her moral failings.

Was the criticism fair? Kind of, yeah — the comments had a tinge of the "successful women tearing down other successful women" dynamic that's worth calling out. But did it merit the sustained campaign of public humiliation that followed? Absolutely not.

This is the thing about social media outrage: it has no natural stopping point. There's no judge. There's no sentencing guideline. There's no proportionality. The punishment is whatever the crowd decides it is on any given day, and the crowd is not a reliable arbiter of justice.

The Forgiveness Gap Nobody Wants to Address

Okay, here's the uncomfortable part. The part I think about a lot.

Why do some people get redemption arcs and others don't? And is the answer actually about what they did, or is it about other factors we're not being honest about?

Robert Downey Jr. had a very public struggle with addiction that included arrests and jail time. He came back and became one of the most beloved actors in Hollywood. Mel Gibson said genuinely horrific antisemitic things during a DUI arrest in 2006. He directed Hacksaw Ridge in 2016 and received an Oscar nomination. Both of these men are white.

Da'Vine Joy Randolph just won an Oscar. Fantasia Barrino just starred in The Color Purple. But I can think of a dozen Black artists and entertainers who had their entire careers dismantled over things that, in a white peer, would have become a chapter in a comeback narrative rather than a career obituary.

I am not saying this to play oppression Olympics. I'm saying it because if we're serious about accountability culture being about justice, we need to interrogate why our forgiveness is so unevenly distributed. Why do certain demographics get "troubled pasts" while others get permanent records? Who gets the benefit of the doubt, and who has to earn it?

These are not rhetorical questions. I genuinely want us to sit with them.

The Performative Accountability Industrial Complex

Another thing I can't stop thinking about: a lot of online outrage has almost nothing to do with the person being called out.

It's about the person doing the calling out.

Dunking on someone problematic is socially rewarding. It signals your values to your community. It gets engagement. It feels righteous in a way that's genuinely pleasurable — researchers have actually studied this, and the part of the brain that activates during moral outrage overlaps significantly with the brain's reward circuitry. We are literally getting a dopamine hit from public condemnation.

That should give us pause.

When the goal shifts from "this person caused harm and should face consequences" to "I want to demonstrate my own virtue by participating in this pile-on," we've left accountability behind and entered something much less defensible. The victim, if there is one, often gets completely lost in the discourse. The conversation becomes about the community's identity, not about actual repair or justice.

What I Actually Think Accountability Should Look Like

I don't think cancel culture is going away, and I'm not sure it should. But I think we could do it so much better.

Accountability should be proportional. A decade-old offensive tweet from a teenager should not carry the same consequences as an adult in a position of power abusing that power. These are not the same.

Accountability should leave room for growth. If someone has demonstrably changed — not just issued a PR apology, but actually, verifiably changed their behavior and made amends where possible — that should matter. If it doesn't matter, we're not interested in better people. We're interested in punishment.

Accountability should be applied consistently. If we're going to hold people responsible for past behavior, we need to apply that standard across race, gender, class, and political affiliation. Selective accountability is just bias with a social justice vocabulary.

And accountability should center the people who were actually harmed — not the internet's collective need to feel morally superior for an afternoon.

The Loud Take

Here it is, as plainly as I can say it: cancel culture, at its best, is a necessary corrective for systems that protect the powerful. At its worst, it's a mob with a smartphone and a persecution complex.

Both of those things are true. Simultaneously. In the same cultural moment.

The work — the actual, hard work — is learning to tell the difference. And that requires nuance, proportionality, and a willingness to ask uncomfortable questions about our own motivations.

I know that's not as satisfying as a clean take. But I'd rather be honest than loud for the sake of it.

...Okay, I'd rather be both. But you get the point.