[insane_dreamer]

I'm 100% against what's happening rn with Trump's fascism, but let's not pretend that there was no cancel culture on the left and pressure on companies. Example: Disney itself fired Gina Carano from The Mandalorian because of comments she made. There was no gov interference -- so what's happening here is much much worse -- but there was a fear (valid or otherwise) of blowback/ratings/whatever.

[ModernMech]

> There was no gov interference -- so what's happening here is much much worse

That's what the other poster is saying. There's a difference between "cancel culture" and what's happening here. Cancel culture is culture, meaning it's something that arises spontaneously through group dynamics, not something that's directed by the government. Yes, Disney fired Gina Carano, but not because Biden tweeted out "Gina Carano is next" and his FCC director said "We can do this the easy way or the hard way". It was because a bunch of Disney's customers pressured Disney.

And that's how the free market / free speech is supposed to work. If that's somehow reprehensible and antisocial, then fine, but then we need to rethink the entire idea of free market capitalism; if the government prevents me and my friends from boycotting some shitty company, then that's not a free market, and what we're doing is crony capitalism, which is just the worst of all worlds.

Can you propose a speech model that supports free speech but disallows cancel culture? As far as I can tell, you'd have to limit free expression and association from the top down to enforce that.

[insane_dreamer]

Yeah, I agree with the way you described it here. Businesses taking corrective action because of customer pressure, or to avoid boycotts or bad media coverage, has long been around, and is just the market. So long as the gov doesn't get involved, that's fine.

If it was just a matter of ABC cancelling Kimmel because they were afraid they'd lose ratings, or even because their new owners dislike Kimmel and his messaging, that's fine and not suppression of free speech. It's the fear of gov action against them that is problematic. Even trying to curry favor with the gov by replacing a talk show host with one more favorable to the gov, is probably still within the realm of "business decision" and not suppression of free speech -- though on the other hand, media shouldn't _need_ to curry favor with the gov because the gov is supposed to be _impartial_ to speech and only gets involved if laws/regulations are being broken. But companies trying to get on the gov's good side seems to be a (bad) feature of capitalism that I don't think we'll ever get rid of.

By the way, the self-censoring that ABC did, for fear of gov retaliation, is exactly how things work in China. The gov doesn't need to censor media companies there -- they self-censor because they know the consequences if they don't.

So basically the Trump admin is no better than communist China (though China's not actually communist, but rather just authoritarian).