Cancel culture. If you have any kind of social media account, you’ve probably seen a high-profile celebrity/brand/influencer and the word canceled tied together at one point or another. Most notably in the beauty world has been the James Charles and Tati Westbrook scandal that occurred in early 2019 and gained immense traction – enough for Charles to lose millions of subscribers overnight and for Westbrook to gain a comparable amount. Now, I don’t want to rehash the Charles/Westbrook scandal; you’ve likely heard enough of that. However, I am going to use them as a way to demonstrate the impacts of cancel culture. What I am going to talk about is cancel culture overall within our current social structure. When does “canceling” someone who’s problematic become… problematic?
I do acknowledge the necessity for cancel culture to exist, to some degree. According to StudyBreaks, “At its core, cancel culture is toxic. It perpetuates the idea that one uneducated opinion invalidates your entire existence, but also pushes people to refute one another instead of inform them.” This perfectly depicts the state of social media cancel culture, in my opinion. The toxicity but necessity for cancel culture is a difficult binary to navigate – how do we, the bystanders, decide who’s allowed to be forgiven or not? There is always more than one side to a story, but how do we know who to believe?
Going back to the Charles/Westbrook feud, fellow YouTuber Andrei Terbea weighed in on cancel culture and the aftermath that followed. Why was it so easy to believe Westbrook when we had limited “receipts” from her? Easy. Westbrook had built her brand and reputation on honesty and transparency – something others say and try to replicate, but manage to still get caught in scandals. Westbrook up until this point, had been in no major scandal and with her video catalog documenting her personality and integrity, her reputation was unbroken. Charles, on the other hand, had already been in several scandals and had not received any lasting backlash until this moment (see Cosmopolitan’s list documenting Charles’ scandals over the years).
While cancel culture is on the rise, how we navigate this issue will be telling of how we handle bigger issues in the future online. Should we be wary of these people who have made mistakes in their past? In my opinion, yes. But what we should really evaluate is when these people have little to no shame or remorse for their actions – people who have been blatantly racist, sexist, homophobic, and sexual assaulters. Their actions, especially when they are outwardly unbothered by them, is when cancel culture works at its best.