Cancel Culture and its Acquisition of the Accountability Movement on Social Media

Cancel Culture has been alive for about a decade; however, as the internet continues to provide a narrower time gap for information to spread, its popularity has risen its usage in political spaces. Now, the conversations we were having before were cute at best and destructive at worst. Since Obama, "the drone striker," wants to get in on it, it is time to get serious about what it is and its complications.

Cancel culture found much of its origins in the Black community. Many of the latest trends, clothing styles, and "internet speak" seem to stem from the community. On god, anything labeled currently new, urban and hip has a pipeline of history connected to black culture. It is colonizer syndrome. Over the last decade, several Black figures, such as Bill Cosby, Chris Brown and R. Kelly, have been put under a larger microscope to separate their impacts as celebrities from the dangerous behavior they exhibit to members of the community, especially the most vulnerable ones in our current society – Black women and Black LGBT members.

But as usual, community discussions, discourse and advocacy find their spotlight in the mainstream. Social media sites have accelerated the skill that allows mainstream generation after mainstream generation to exploit Black culture. 

Vine and TikTok both have been a checkpoint on the path to being intertwined with the internet. Their work as social media platforms represents the ideology of the people in this digital state, and the popularity of each showed that they did it well. Vine was a social networking site that ran between 2013-2017. Its original focus was to be a six-second app primarily for creative pieces. 

Well. It got creative.

Some of its most popular content focused on incidents caught by accident: the humor was in the authenticity of the people within the content. It was naturally funny. This was until, like most platforms, its ability to be monetized drowned out some of that authenticity, and it became saturated with profit-motivated content. This transition, however, did not tarnish the good name of the app. The yearning, depressed and nostalgic atmosphere we live in spurred the creation of all types of YouTube compilations. Titles such as "Vines that keep me awake everyday" to “‘The Office’ But As Vines," kept the core idea of Vine being an app that emotionally connected with people. 

This hyper-aware, cynical hot-headed phenomenon managed to couple itself with the new social media literate generation, and this found perfect nesting grounds in TikTok. TikTok is much more deliberate in the jokes and stories it wishes to tell. Essentially, each of these social media platforms garnered popularity from their relation to the times' culture and their ability to be palatable.

Vine mirrored the introduction and assimilation of the internet and its use in the world. The content was not innocent, but it was relatably awkward and enjoyable. TikTok mirrors an entirely different aesthetic. These two apps had shared similar principles but expressed them in very different ways.

Currently, TikTok is home to a myriad of content. The app is the evidence in the thesis that the human body, its work, and any available talent it has can be marketed. Social media appeal is incredibly important. Everyone has an image or idea to share. Creativity can be made into professional content. Our knowledge of the power of platforms has made us more personal. TikTok can be a source for information from all sorts of fields; it's a place for perfectly crafted mini-movies. Hell, a damn musical was almost born out of it.

TikTok as the current cultural staple, has almost instantaneously given way to discussions on Cancel Culture. With its personal marketing shtick, the conversation has opened avenues of "professional opinion" that most people who know about the subject wish they had never seen.

YourFaveisProblematic (YFIP) gave cancel culture its official platform. Although its original intent was of authentic accountability, it was overwhelmed by the rapidly changing political climate of the youth in conjunction with the internet's swiftness. Most users had two very extreme reactions: one, a fierce sense of protection over the person they are in a parasocial relationship with, and the other, a fluent understanding and practice of performative action. The latter group of people's toxicities was subtler than that of those who defended their faves to the grave. Users spammed YourFaveisProblematic with questions that could be simplified to "who do I stan to look like a good person?" This came in many forms.

With Black people, specifically Black women, as the original community behind cancel culture's initial idea of critique and accountability of the powerful, many people fell into an old habit of relying on the intellectual property of Black women. People would flood to outspoken Black women begging for information on what this person did and why it was bad. Black women were seen as mammies whose main purpose on the internet was to be activism and critical analysis machines. So, when many women defended themselves by telling people to do the research themselves on the effects of toxic celebrity behavior, people took that advice and went nuts. 

YFIP was bombarded with these same types of consistent asks, in addition to people pointing out its flaws, trolls, etc. The YFIP formula consisted of listings of problematic things that celebrities had done, going from Chinese tattoos or bhindis that people would get to slurs they would use, and the creepy behavior they would exhibit with evidence. With its location on Tumblr, the original "progressive media sight," it did explore in-depth the seriousness of these topics. Although the blog has a diverse set of posts dedicated to creating a context for these allegations and their harm, most people only remembered the simple list of problematic behavior, disregarding any added information and history to the damage caused by much of these troubling behaviors. Its format became easily absorbable while not picking up any nuances. 

With the significant shift from Tumblr to Twitter after the pornography erasure, many people who found themselves playing with the new idea of canceling, and the growing infamy of YFIP, began to create the modern concept of what we perceive cancel culture to be. A critical distinction is unlike Tumblr, Twitter is home to all manners of famous figures and years of history, making it easy to find evidence of previous wrongdoing. 

This new version was a watered-down example of its ancestry. For one, now "atrocities" such as anti-ship find themselves in these cancel culture "receipt lists," completely disregarding that we want the accountability of severe situations, not others' fandom problems. Speaking of fandoms, stan culture has profoundly affected this new phenomenon. I believe there to be a tie between the parasocial relationships we have with celebrities, artists and their work, and the communities we develop online becoming more intimate. The original idea of cancel culture was to critique the dangers within the Black community, but the fandom community has replaced that intent. However, the fandom community is not as grave. There is no oppression tied to fandom. And mixing fandom in with serious issues of homophobia and racism outside of actual analysis of these structures in work is warped and heinous. Dropping somebody's nudes or bringing up tweets of someone saying the n-word because they insulted your fave is not noble. It is exploitative.

To the people who ridiculed YFIP and sites that made the same type of content that was often on these lists of problematic behaviors, these sites are ridiculed with bigotry. This is the position of many politicians. These are the people who view cancel culture as a witch hunt that outshines "real racism," as shone in an ironic article by Ben Shapiro discussing how the new age of racial enlightenment and critique makes way to erase "real" activism.

Although many of the original Black people who started the discussions that went down the dark transformation to cancel culture are against the modern interpretation, they still see the importance of bringing up these conversations. In this culture, accountability is not prioritized. From the way we raise children to believe that if one person is bullying another it is still everybody's fault, to our history of refusing to acknowledge how racism and colonialism have affected the lives of many people to this very moment, we as a people do not prioritize taking accountability for our actions and how they affect the people around us. That is what cancel culture initially advocated. Although cancel culture's original intent has shifted, Black people and many other marginalized communities will not stop demanding that oppressors take accountability for the systems that are deteriorating our livelihoods.