With no cynicism, we can say that this is the era of social media. The millennials and Gen Z reside in social media. Almost everyone has an identity online and somewhere into this uproar, we have started valuing our online identity more than our real-life identities. You can be a normal school student, and online you can be a famous TikToker. You can be an IT professional and online you can be a fashion influencer. This online identity has also given birth to a toxic social media trend called “The Cancel Culture”. 

Canceling and cancel culture have to do with the removal of support for public figures in response to their objectionable behavior or opinions. This can include boycotts or refusal to promote their work. When something gets canceled, you expect them to go away like a TV show.

Some of the most famous cases of ‘The Cancel Culture’ are the recent cancellation of James Charles over some YouTube drama, the cancel party of Taylor Swift over a lie, and the cancellation of Demi Lovato over a fake Instagram account. You agree to a rumor that you hear about a famous personality. You choose to believe it and everyone hops on to the bandwagon to cancel them. When a group of people say they are bad, they automatically become bad for the majority. This is called the Bandwagon Effect. 

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The bandwagon effect is characterized by the probability of individual adoption increasing with respect to the proportion who have already done so. As more people come to believe in something, others also “hop on the bandwagon” regardless of the underlying evidence. When the internet decides to cancel someone, it’s not about who is right or who is wrong, it’s about what the majority says. If the majority says a particular person is wrong and should be canceled, it doesn’t matter how much evidence there is to prove the majority wrong, no one will believe it. 

There is no one reason to show why Cancel Culture is wrong. Actually, there are many! The first obvious reason why this is wrong and problematic is that it completely negates the fact that people can unlearn and grow. It doesn’t give people the chance to correct their mistakes. But the bigger problem is the Bandwagon Effect of Cancel Culture.

Everyone wants to be in the majority. Because the majority wins, right? However, when you are so focused to be in the majority that you compromise your own intelligent opinions and ideas. If this continues, we are not going to be a world full of different individuals, we are all going to be a collective majority of clones. 

The world progresses when we correct our mistakes.

The world progresses when we debate about our difference in opinion.

The world progresses when we give each other a chance.

We progress when we feel safe to make mistakes and learn from them. This growing uproar of cancel culture and how a ‘majority’ has fallen prey to the bandwagon effect of it is stopping the world from progressing. The only solution is to cancel the cancel culture?

Pratiksha Rajopadhyaya