by thenewgreen

Old article, but new to me. What are your thoughts?

Cancel culture is not about righting wrongs or making the world more tolerant — it's an addiction to power

And this is precisely the point. Good people can say bad things; most people can and do learn from their mistakes. And sometimes, on the internet, things are misunderstood, misrepresented, and blown out of proportion. (Most of the time, to be fair.)

Indeed, we seem to thrive on doing just that: taking a headline, an out of context comment or joke, and running with it, never reading the article, asking questions about context, never wondering what else might have been happening beyond the frame. We love to hate, so much more than we love the truth or love to understand.

This has led to a real culture of fear. Young people feel so afraid of ostracism that they won’t be honest, even with their closest friends. “I probably hold back 90 percent of the things that I want to say due to fear of being called out,” one student told The Atlantic 2017. “People won’t call you out because your opinion is wrong. People will call you out for literally anything.” This isn’t uncommon; we all know that those deemed to have made “wrong” comments do not get conversations, they get cancelled. Online and in real life.