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From a deontological perspective, a culture where punishment for wrongthink is dished out by social media is better than one where wrongthink is outright illegal. That's why I like living in America, where there are no hate speech laws.
But a thought occurred to me: from a consequentialist perspective, it'd be better to let "cancelling" be done by the state, because then people can defend themselves and a court can decide if they're truly guilty of the offense.
I'm ignorant of international affairs, so I have a question for those of you who are better-educated and/or not American: in a culture where there are hate speech laws, like Britain, are Twitter which hunts less common?
The are a lot of problems with popular cancel culture.
First of all, since there are no stated norms, there’s no way to know for sure that anything you say isn’t going to meet the cultural ban-hammer. In 2010 the issue of gay marriage was controversial, as in people were voting on it, and there were campaigns for AND against, all of which were perfectly legitimate — and would be met with horror by the high powered today. Today it’s almost I legitimate to bring up the issue of not only gay but trans identity as unworthy topics for a kindergarten classroom.
The above becomes even more of an issue when the constantly moving goalposts of acceptable speech meet the permanence of forever archives online. Things that I said twenty years ago are now basically alt-right positions. They might well have been liberal positions in 2000. Except that they still exist ready to be discovered and used.
These two situations end up creating a massive chilling effect in which people refuse to talk about issues that touch culture wars. Not because they’re polite, but because they fear the consequences of being on the record on those topics. Do you want your opinion on trans people in sports on the record? What about children getting surgeries?
Beyond that, there’s nothing really preventing the use of cancel culture as a weapon. I don’t like you, or you’re a direct competitor with me, I can take you down with an out of context post or tweet or conversation. And there’s no preventing people from applying the rules unevenly— canceling a republican for saying what democrats say with impunity.
A second issue is that really, the private sector has a lot of leverage over you that the government doesn’t. Banks and payment systems are private. They can simply refuse to do business with you. Your boss can fire you. The landlord can refuse to rent to you. If you need a private certification to do your job, the private certification company can simply not issue or renew that credential.
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