Consider these possible explanations for the popularity of cancel culture:
-- Strong legal protections for speech leave people grasping for other avenues to resist ideas they find objectionable
-- Calls for cancellation don't really have any hope of driving ideas out of the discourse (the ability to find an audience is just too great today), but they are mostly a means of signaling group affiliation in a time when there are fewer social groups people have ties to in the real world
-- The nature of social media makes calls for cancellation particularly attractive: People in authority overreact to relatively small numbers of low commitment comments (i.e. making a comment is low cost, e.g. in contrast to a hunger strike) on social media. These low costs also make people likely to make more extreme and less considered statements on social media because elements of those low costs include anonymity and lack of physical presence (which would have a moderating influence). I suspect this will change as people develop better intuitions about the nature of social media, but it is also possible that change may be slow and may require other moderating institutions (formal or informal).
Consider these possible explanations for the popularity of cancel culture:
-- Strong legal protections for speech leave people grasping for other avenues to resist ideas they find objectionable
-- Calls for cancellation don't really have any hope of driving ideas out of the discourse (the ability to find an audience is just too great today), but they are mostly a means of signaling group affiliation in a time when there are fewer social groups people have ties to in the real world
-- The nature of social media makes calls for cancellation particularly attractive: People in authority overreact to relatively small numbers of low commitment comments (i.e. making a comment is low cost, e.g. in contrast to a hunger strike) on social media. These low costs also make people likely to make more extreme and less considered statements on social media because elements of those low costs include anonymity and lack of physical presence (which would have a moderating influence). I suspect this will change as people develop better intuitions about the nature of social media, but it is also possible that change may be slow and may require other moderating institutions (formal or informal).