Imagine this: it’s a normal day and you are doing your daily routine when suddenly, you check your phone and are bombarded by hate on social media. You’ve been canceled.

Canceled culture refers to when the general public attempts to silence influential people such as celebrities, internet personalities, and those in politics when something they say or do is perceived as offensive. People who have been the focus of crime allegations are also subject to being canceled. 

What felt like the once seemingly useful way to speak out against problematic people in power has since turned into a cluster of hate targeted towards anything that people do.

For example, R&B singer R. Kelly was canceled for his charges of sexual assault of minors. Many cancelers, as well as normal twitter users, were disgusted by this. “Twitter R. Kelly and Bill Cosby are PREDATORS! Please do not mention them when referring to innocent black men. You only dilute your point,” said one user who referred to Bill Cosby, another “canceled” celebrity. 

Recently, this canceled culture has become more and more prominent on popular social media outlets, like Twitter, and has quickly grown quite a large following.

As a person who has many accounts on social media, it is very normal for me to encounter canceled culture. I most clearly remember when the drama of Lil Nas X was trending on Twitter. A fan of rapper Nicki Minaj created a twitter thread containing old tweets made by Lil Nas X. In his tweets, he bashed the religion of Islam and Muslims, claiming they promoted violence. 

Though he commented on this and apologized for his islamophobic behavior, people were relentless anyway. The cancelers trended “LilNasXIsOverParty”, where the cancelers tweeted things like, “If you follow Lil Nas block now he’s Islamophobic”, and “I’m finna spam the timeline with #lilnasxisoverparty even if I’m the only one idc if imma look like a clown f**k him.” Not only this, a few cancelers went as far as to leak nude photos of him when he was a minor.

Canceled culture not only makes the social media community look bad but shows how unapologetically hateful society can be. Its original purpose was not to nitpick every little thing we don’t like about people, but to carefully criticize an influential person’s wrongdoings, whether it be something they’ve said in poor taste or something terrible they did. Yet many people disregard the obvious problematic people, and will still search and dig up any dirt they can find in order to tarnish otherwise innocent people’s careers. What about second chances? The attitude that canceled culture perpetuates gives its victims absolutely no time to reflect on what they did to receive the hate they are given. Most importantly, the majority of cancelers don’t acknowledge the apologies made by the person under fire. 

In the age of the internet, everybody has a persona or avatar that they may maintain online, and the platform of social media allows the average person to gain popularity and find a following for themself on the internet. But with that power of being able to influence a larger group of people, it is easy for a person to have made some sort of mistake on their path. It’s important to keep in mind that nobody is perfect and our opinions are constantly growing and evolving every day.