I know two people who have been falsely accused, both accusations made to their employer, not on the Internet. So not actually “cancel culture”. Fwiw, both were white men and I suspect both would have ultimately won in the court of opinion had it gotten to the Internet.
One was a colleague of my husband, accused of hitting on a college student. (My husband was a junior professor at the time.) I believe the guy’s story because:
- My husband thought the woman was crazy and dangerous, and was very careful to never be alone with her.
- The guy who was accused was distracted because he was engaged to be married. This made him less cautious.
- She had no evidence, just claims that “he was obsessed with her.”
But she threatened to sue, and the university thought that would be damaging both to them and to the guy. They arranged to both dismiss him and also to quietly get him a job elsewhere.
Note that the risk here wasn’t from “cancel culture”, it was from the fallout of ordinary legal action, and the reputational risk thereof. So, “cancellation via the legal system”.
The other was my brother. He traveled to a conference with a female colleague. The admin suggested that he book the same flight as hers, so he did. She took this as a sign that he was stalking her, and made a formal complaint. He learned later that he wasn’t promoted when he would have expected that to happen because of the investigation against him (which HR didn’t bother to inform him of until much later.) Ultimately, HR concluded he had done nothing wrong, and a bit after that, the woman was fired for lying about completely unrelated things. (Lying about work things, just not about him.) But his career was set back by about a year due to the false accusation.
So i certainly believe that accusations are sometimes false. And that false accusations are damaging. I’m not really convinced that “cancel culture” has made “false accusations about sexual harassment” significantly worse. The kid with the maga hat is a better example of the hazards of cancel culture. And there, i think, the problem has more to do with bad actors amongst “social media” than with “people posting about issues they, personally, have experienced.”