Integrity Score 1712
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Alexi McCammond’s journalism career was rapidly ascending. She was a political reporter for Axios and a fixture on cable news.
Jeffrey Toobin was an award-winning lawyer-turned-journalist. He wrote for The New Yorker, provided legal analysis on CNN and authored a New York Times best-selling book on O.J. Simpson.
And Mimi Groves was accepted to the renowned University of Tennessee’s cheer team, who were reigning national champions.
Each life was charmed.
But social media’s penetrating gaze and uncontrollable virality unearthed troubling personal moments for each of them. Their lives became disrupted in ways once unimaginable.
Digital fall from grace
In March 2021, McCammond was primed to assume the editor-in-chief position at Teen Vogue. However, offensive tweets from her teenage years resurfaced. Staff members were outraged and McCammond resigned before she even started.
Toobin was caught exposed during a staff Zoom call, costing him multiple jobs.
And a seconds-long Snapchat video showed Groves stating a racial epithet. Public pressure forced Groves off her beloved Tennessee cheer team, and she later withdrew from the university.
Different circumstances, similar results and each was embroiled in cancel culture. Cancel culture is “promoting the ‘cancelling’ of people, brands and even shows and movies due to what some consider to be offensive or problematic remarks or ideologies.”
This phenomenon has exploded due to social media’s amplifying powers, society’s deep divisions and difficulties redressing longstanding inequities.
Violating standards of public morality can exact severe consequences, both online and off. This includes penalizing both the transgressors and those harmed by their offensive words or deeds.
The roots of cancel culture
Cancel culture arose in the popular consciousness decades ago. It is paradoxical that a term now used to counter problems like sexism emerged from a song about a bad romance that was later incorporated into a misogynistic movie scene.
Legendary Chic guitarist Nile Rodgers wrote the song Your Love Is Cancelled in response to a date gone awry.
Read more:
https://theconversation.com/can-we-cancel-cancel-culture-164666