I think that what usually happens is that you get a formal warning from HR. That’s if she reports it, and if HR believes her, and if they don’t value you a lot more than they value her.
I’m not sure what you are referring to. There were stories about bakers refusing to bake a cake for a couple they knew to be gay. Those bakers might have been “cancelled”. If there are bakers who would make a cake for two men, but refuse to place a gay topper on the cake (and I’m guessing that many bakers who doesn’t keep such toppers in stock might do so) that’s not called “cancelling”. I’m not sure there’s a catchy word for that at all.
Especially when you can have fund raisers and free publicity that far outmatch any supposed “cancelling”.
My point was kinda linguistic. Wedding toppers weren’t “cancelled”. Bakers might have been. Cancelling is something done to a person or company. Not to a symbol.
This is a fairly unwieldy topic so, to try and give a fairly concrete and simple answer to (what I think is) the main subject of the OP:
Censorship is an attempt to prevent other people from encountering particular ideas that the censor has decided is not appropriate for society. Nothing more. Nothing less.
On a theoretical grounds, that’s very cut and dried. Either I had a primary intent to suppress your ideas or I did not.
If I am funding a movie that you’re making and discover that you have an antisemitic message in the dialogue, I might revoke funding because I don’t share that message and don’t want to be associated with it - but yet, I might donate money to the ACLU to defend your movie in court against the censors, on the day that you’re able to find someone who does fund it through to distribution. My revocation of funds was, clearly, not censorship. Yes, you need to find a different sponsor, but I’m under no obligation to sponsor things that I don’t agree with.
But if I’m violently opposed to the idea that anyone should ever release a movie with an antisemitic message, work behind the scenes to blacklist you from the industry, lobby the government to write laws that ban antisemitic messages, etc. then my agenda is simply and easily censorship. No one can hear antisemitic messages. They don’t have that right, I’m working to block it.
In practice, and without the ability to read a person’s mind, the difference in intent may be difficult to suss out. If I inform others of my reason for backing out of the film - leading to an effective blackballing - then I may block the movie from getting made by anyone. Was my intent to censor? Or was it to protect others from creating and becoming associated with a work that I might reasonably believe they might not prefer to be associated with? No matter what I say about the matter, I may have had a censoring intent. We can’t know without a mind reading machine.
So while it is a fairly straight and easy thing to explain. It’s difficult to definitively prove, since it’s more about intent than action.
The first is very different than the second.
It wasn’t intended to be a subtle distinction. I’d just say that most examples won’t be so obvious from the outside.
Well, I agree. But I’ve debated with plenty of posters here who will defend punishing people for words or associations rather than deeds, as long as it’s done by the private sector (even when the government is leaning on social media to censor certain topics).
Many people on both sides today think winning the war of words is what matters, even if that means fighting dirty, and abandoning the values we should be fighting to preserve.
This is also a feature of modern day cancel culture. People get attacked merely for defending a friend; sometimes if they stay silent they are pressed to denounce the target of the mob’s ire, under threat of suffering the same fate.
Speech isn’t punishment. “I think what you said is terrible, and I’m going to stop patronizing your business, and I hope others do too…” is speech. It’s a response. Maybe it’s a good response, maybe it’s a bad response, but it’s just more speech either way.
Doxxing someone and emailing their boss in an attempt to get them fired is trying to punish them. I used to see self-appointed moral busybodies @-ing people’s employers on Twitter fairly regularly over things they had said in a private capacity. (Occasionally, the person would be able to reply that they ran the org in question and would not be firing themselves, thank you very much. That was always satisfying.)
It’s like @Sage_Rat said: if your aim is to prevent people hearing certain ideas, then your aim is censorship. If you just want to stop people believing those ideas, then you can argue against them, show evidence they are wrong, try to persuade people that your ideas are better. That would be the liberal way to respond to bad and incorrect beliefs.
If your aim is to ban them from social media, prevent books on them being published or sold, disrupt live talks so no one can hear them, get venues to cancel events so no one can meet up to discuss them, and get anyone who expresses those ideas fired or blacklisted - your aim is censorship.
That was also my impression — in the general social media “mainstream” in the early 20teens what there had been was a phenomenon labeled as “online shaming” that is what applied to general people or entities about whom something embarassing was revealed or who stated something inappropriate.
“Cancel” IIRC was at the time used for specific troubling cases in the public eye in the community (or bringing up that should be), often in the form of “#cancel(person, show, product)” attached to material denouncing just what was it that was wrong.
ISTM that by the time of the rise of #MeToo the #cancel terminology had “crossed over” (so much more positive than “appropriated”, right? 
), and broadened in use so then, once it was being used (and/or misused) regarding people or things the “mainstream” paid attention to, it was quickly turned into snarl words (started saying surprisingly quickly but looking back it was no surprise).
Okay, that’s pretty extreme. But it’s still just a tool. If someone is molesting children, or advocating that it’s okay to molest children, then extreme action may be warranted. In most cases it would not be.
Honestly, i would not be trying to get a guy fired from working as an accountant because he molested children. I might be trying to get him in prison. But if he’s served his time and there was no evidence he was currently molesting children, well, everyone needs to make a living, and you don’t generally deal with sex or children in many jobs.
But that’s different. What if he’s anonymously but publicly advocating that molestation and child porn are okay? Or for racial genocide? All I’m saying is that there are circumstances where even an extreme tool like doxxing might be warranted. Not many, but more than zero.
Yeah, I’d be okay with doxxing in that case.
I don’t think “cancel culture” is about censorship. I think it’s about consequences for actions taken. Which might include advocating for certain positions believed to be harmful by the little attempting to “cancel” the advocate. Advocating is an action.
You can’t very well lobby to “cancel” someone without saying why. It’s not as if you are somehow hiding their statements. Often, you are publishing them.
If I find out the guy who makes my coffee is using internet anonymity to advocate for a white supremacist America in which all non-whites must be purged, doxxing might be warranted.
Right. It’s not censorship to tell the truth and share one’s opinion. Even if the opinion is “that guy sucks and should shut up”.
Just a few points:
- Corporate boycotts are an effective and necessary form of “cancelling”. In a capitalist society, it’s the only tool we have to ensure that we are treated fairly.
- Targeting individuals with a cancelling action is inappropriate most, but not all, of the time.
- Speech can be destructive, and I would think that we should understand that better in today’s world better than at any other time in history.
- I feel that the censorship of destructive speech is not only appropriate but necessary.
Since I made my last post, I have remembered another incident of alleged cancel culture from a time before the term was in common use. There was a right wing extremist who was touring college campuses giving hate speeches directed towards the LGBT community, and campuses started to cancel his events. This resulted in complaints from the extreme right that their rights were being violated and/or that all of the intolerance was coming from the left.
The point is that intolerance to intolerance is necessary, and any venue that hosts public events should have the freedom to filter out speakers who are there to only spread hate speech. These people are not being cancelled or censored, per se, because there are hundreds of different avenues they can pursue to spread their hate. But it is unrealistic to expect any institution to condone that type of behavior.
Yeah, given those circumstances, neither would I.
Paedophilia-related stuff is actually a popular target for right-wing cancellation attempts: eg art that they consider fetishises children, teachers showing kids what they consider inappropriately sexual material, researchers who they consider to be excusing paedophilia (eg by trying to draw a distinction between attraction to children and abuse of children, and help people with the former avoid offending). Like the left-wing campaigns, it’s tough to argue against because you’re seen as defending abhorrent people or ideas, but it still needs to be fought.
Of course you can. You just say “so-and-so is a racist” or they’re a white supremacist, or antisemitic, or a transphobe. That’s all 90% of people will ever hear about them. They won’t get to hear that person’s actual views, or their arguments or evidence for them, because you are preventing them sharing them. ‘Deplatforming’ is the explicit aim.