[asdf123wtf]

It's a media-driven moral panic, more or less. There's a whole cottage industry of media orgs and personalities making lucrative livings by selling cancel-culture moral-panic content to audiences who are addicted to it (e.g. Bari Weiss, Brett Weinstein, etc).

Not that there aren't legitimate free speech issues that we still wrestle with and don't get right or real injustices out there, but it's mostly a bugaboo.

[smsm42]

You are using the term "moral panic" wrongly. Cancel culture is the moral panic, only enabled and amplified by modern information technologies.

[jghn]

> only enabled and amplified by modern information technologies

I'll take it a step further. "cancel culture" is the same moral panic that's always existed. But now the power is put in the hands of the masses instead of the elite.

[hutzlibu]

Lynch mobs have always existed.

[freejazz]

Yeah, but the internet didn't.

[asdf123wtf]

One possible reaction to a moral panic is another moral panic and that's exactly where I think we are here.

Cancel-culture panic is a largely anecdote and feelings-driven. There's no real data to show that firings or social consequences for speech are more numerous or more severe or more unjust (or even more "left-wing") today than they have been at any point in the past.

And in many of these anecdotes that seem to drive the discourse, nothing of note actually happens to the person who was "cancelled" - they are the subject of an investigation or social media dust-up for a news cycle. Then life carries on.

[smitty1e]

Concern about a tyranny of the majority is neither novel nor imagined.

The Information Age has had a catalytic effect on the calls for ousters of any number of people for the merest hint of thoughtcrime.