In the world we live in, it is impossible not to be aware of cancel culture. Anybody is vulnerable to cancellation, from influencers to businesses to presidents, but how do we as a society determine who deserves to be cancelled? And, perhaps more importantly, how do we decide when they’ve served their sentence and are ready to reenter the public realm?
One of my favourite YouTubers, Chelsea from The Financial Diet, is currently facing backlash on YouTube over a video she made about neurodivergence. She used the ‘you people can’t do anything’ meme to discuss how neurodivergent people need to just… get over themselves? This is clearly untrue and a damaging rhetoric for someone with a platform of 1.35 million subscribers! However, she has created many videos in the past about eating disorders and other social issues that were interesting and multifaceted and, in my opinion, were nuanced and compassionate. To make such sweeping statements about an already marginalised group of people is dangerous, but does that mean she should no longer have any type of platform, despite the previous good she’s done?
I think that the original video Chelsea posted is a product of people making leaps and assumptions and sharing an opinion that they actually have no real grounding in. People have said it seems like she knows one ND person in real life that she just doesn’t like, and decided that everyone is therefore like that, and thus a video just had to be made. In this age of oversharing and this panopticon state we live in, the boundary between what should be shared and what should be private has been shattered, and this leads to much larger societal action against offenders that was completely avoidable.
A better example of this would be within the ‘momfluencing’ sphere on TikTok. The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives took the world by storm, but mom vloggers and family channels have existed since the dawn of YouTube. Anybody aware of this area of the internet knows that a new family channel seems to be exposed and cancelled every day, yet the platform for them to exist in the first place does nothing to prevent any of the ‘cancellable’ actions undertaken by these channels. I reference TSLOMW because Taylor Franke Paul is unavoidable in this conversation. Season after season, we watch her make decisions that wreck her own life, her friends’ and families’ lives, and, most importantly, her children’s lives, yet she continues to be provided a platform and the means to continue these dangerous behaviours. We have cancelled people for much, much less and never seen or heard from them again, so who decided that Taylor Franke Paul wouldn’t be one of those people?
My provisional answer lies in how this surveillance state has changed how we view and interact with the online, particularly within Gen Z, the first generation to truly grow up with and have all facets of life influenced by the internet. What TFP is going through is awful, and the influence of that on those around her is even worse, but it’s a tale as old as time, or as old as MTV has existed. Reality TV breaks the illusion of separation between the celebrity and the consumer, meaning the viewer feels they are somehow owed the full story, therefore cancellation is not an option. Of course, the networks could and should step in, but the money talks, and as long as we’re watching, they’re earning.
That means that when an independent public figure, say an influencer or an artist, commits a cancellable offence, they don’t have the same safety net afforded to reality stars, and thus they face much harsher, often career-ending consequences for lesser ‘crimes’. The stakes are so high for these influencers and public figures because their whole brand and business is decided by their audience, and to lose all support so suddenly, as is common with cancel culture, is to lose everything. But how is gen Z involved?
Before we get into this I want to disclaim that there are acts committed by public figures that absolutely require deplatforming and outside intervention. Through this article I am not referring to those.
Cancel culture in 2026 looks a lot different to how it did during woke 1.0 (2010-2016). Every thought shared online must be thoroughly neutral to not stir up some sort of discourse; it’s the whole pancake waffles situation. Now of course, we must be kind and thoughtful towards other when sharing opinions online, and when people are spreading hateful, damaging, or misinformed thoughts and feelings online, we should speak up and make the issue known. That is where cancel culture was born after all, and when used appropriately, it is very important. However, the internet and social media are undergoing a nuance crisis. One can only be good or bad in the eyes of society currently, and Gen Z are developing undernourished reasoning and deduction skills, and instead analysing all content and all people through a very slim gaze that fails to account for the human experience of learning and evolving as a person. When we are bound by such strict moral standards, people are too scared to make mistakes and then take lessons from those experiences, creating stagnation in productive and meaningful discourse.
The metaphor of the panopticon has never been more relevant than it is today. Foucault presented the idea of a constant state of fear instilled by the knowledge that you could be being surveilled at any moment, a fear that most Gen Z feel in the age of Meta glasses and Flock cameras. We are both the prisoners and the guards in our society, a dichotomy that will never be successful as long as humans crave the power and ego that comes with policing others.
To call someone out for their poor behaviour is to position yourself as the moral ‘good’ that counters the immorality that is now externally placed upon and associated with the cancelled subject, placing yourself on a pedestal that feeds your own ego. Therefore, in the pursuit of this self-affirming feeling, the actual problematic behaviour that caused the discourse in the first place is forgotten, and instead of providing constructive, educational criticism, the site of discourse is now overtaken by virtue-signalling and egocentrism that stifles real action and activism.
Outside of deplatforming, the purpose of cancel culture is to educate and reform in the hopes of creating less hate, fear, and misinformation on social media. As human beings, we err and make mistakes. We are in a constant process of becoming, as people in ourselves and as human beings cohabiting one planet together. We must afford each other grace and the room to evolve our thinking, beliefs, and knowledge. If there is no chance of social recovery, then where is the incentive to try to become better?