One of the beauties of social media is the fact that it allows freedom of expression, giving a voice to its millions of users in any and every subject you could think of.
However, over the last few years, there has been the rise of cancel culture, which is basically the movement of a large group on social media showing their disapproval to a certain person, usually after they’ve done a wrongdoing. It seems recently, barely a day goes by without another celebrity being ‘cancelled’ which in turn is followed by a flood of abusive comments targeted towards them online.
Although there are some cases which do seem a fair case for online hate, more and more recently, there seems to be a blurring between the lines of a celebrity committing a crime that warrants abuse, or them making a silly comment that if truth be told, any of us could have said.
The trouble is as humans we LOVE to gossip, and truth be told half the time when we hear about the wrongdoings of a public figure, we find it out from Twitter users, or a friend of a friend of a friend.
With rumours spread as quickly as the click of a button, it can be hard to ever know what the truth and context behind it all is. And with celebrities, we know they’re someone we’ll never have to face, so it’s easy to send death threats through a screen.
A great example of this is Molly-Mae, an ex-love islander and influencer with over 6 million Instagram followers. She’s been cancelled several times, for a whole host of different reasons; from criticising the food in Venice, to more recently saying that we all have the same 24 hours in a day so we can therefore all achieve the same things.
Youtubers ‘Calfreezy’ and ‘TheBurntChip’ spoke about her recently getting cancelled on their podcast ‘The Fellas,’ saying although what she said was stupid, the abuse is going too far.
They said: “There’s no need to cancel someone, you can educate someone and tell them- ‘what you said I think is wrong’.”
Followed by, “You shouldn’t care that much, you know what she said something stupid, you don’t agree with it, move on.”
At the end of the day, don’t get me wrong. I do believe there are many people out there who do deserve to be called out for the things they say or do and some things are unforgivable, however another part of me believes how can we expect people to grow if instead of educating them, we bully and hate.
Caroline Flack’s suicide is a prime example of a celebrity being cancelled despite us not really knowing the full situation, and being completely harassed.
You would think that after that situation we would have changed our ways a little bit; but we still have a way to go.
