With our lives being so connected with the Internet, especially social media platforms, it provokes people to speak out and comment on different issues, which has indirectly facilitated the creation of the cancel culture. To “cancel” someone doesn’t seem nice at all, but it has a good intention to start with, there’s no doubt. Still, I am going to throw this out there: Cancel culture has lost its meaning and needs to be stopped.
Those who are engaged in the culture would argue that it is promoting freedom of speech, and this act can suppress individuals that make comments or actions which are inappropriate, or even offensive to the audience. Yet, there is enough evidence to show that those who proactively cancel people are actually curtailing this freedom, by making the celebrities afraid to express themselves because they are feared that they would be criticised even further for defending their initial mistakes.
KSI, British YouTuber
English YouTuber and rapper KSI quitted Twitter in April 2021 as he had enough of the ''pretentious people'' on the platform trying to cancel him 24/7. With a subscriber count of 23.5M and a member of the YouTube group “The Sidemen”, he was involved in an incident where he unintentionally misgendered a transgender person in a video on the group’s channel in March. Very soon after, the YouTuber was cancelled for using the transphobic term. He then tweeted, stating that he was unaware of the mistake during the shoot and apologised. One month later, KSI announced that he quitted Twitter as people are continuously attacking the Englishman with Tweets like “You’re cancelled” or ''I can’t believe he said that word''. In the Tweet, he mentioned, “Now, it (Twitter)’s full of pretentious people ready to cancel and destroy someone’s legacy.”
KSI's Tweet regarding his decision to quit Twitter
Very sadly, that’s the reality. People nowadays seem to rush into judgement without knowing much information. When one person starts to cancel someone, others jump on the bandwagon straight away after knowing absolutely nothing about the issue. Most importantly, there appears to be a theme that it only takes one sentence for someone to be cancelled forever. When people get hold of a narrative that someone has made an unacceptable claim, the “army” would never let that go, to a point where some people would even spread hate messages on the person who made the fault. They would do anything on the Internet just to destroy everything that celebrities and influencers built up with their pure hard work. Cancel culture has ruined social media, in a way that it is actually delivering a message that no one is safe. If you make a mistake, you would be crucified.
At the end of the day, we are all humans. Nobody’s perfect and we make mistakes. The key is how we react to these mistakes and correct them. If cancel culture were to go on, social media would continue to be overrun and we will day-by-day move further away from the days where the Internet connects people, peacefully.
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