Cancel culture, public judgement and the growing fear of saying the wrong thing
9 min read · 1,634 words
Honestly, I was scared to start this blog
Turns out, putting yourself out there on the internet is not quite as easy as it looks. Planning it all was thrilling, but when it came down to actually doing it, things got a little more terrifying. I was scared. Yeah, like, proper shitting-my-pants scared.
I was scared that people might judge me, disagree with me, and that it would somehow backfire. I spent an embarrassing amount of time thinking about what to post and how much of myself to put out there. I’m still holding back sometimes. Some topics I’m not ready to write about, and others are too intimate for the internet. Some things can remain between me, myself and my journal, thank you very much.
My initial thought was always: Who does she think she is, taking up space on the internet and broadcasting her opinions?
Then the question changed. What if people actually resonate with what I have to say?
There will ALWAYS be someone who doesn’t like what you do or what you say. After my first blog entry, I think I even received my first hate comment. Or feedback, depending on how generous we’re feeling.
And the craziest thing? It excited me. Something I’d been afraid of actually happened, and I was fine. The world didn’t end. Nobody came knocking on my door. I survived.
I don’t need the entire world to agree with me to believe I’m allowed to express an opinion. But if you’ve ever reread a message five times before hitting post or send, you probably know the question that follows: What if people turn on me? That’s what got me thinking about cancel culture.
So, what actually is cancel culture?
Cancel culture is generally understood as a phenomenon in which a person or group faces widespread criticism, social exclusion, boycotts or professional consequences after saying or doing something considered offensive or unacceptable. Social media isn’t the only place it happens, but it certainly amplifies it.
Now, before anyone starts sharpening their pitchforks: I think criticism is good. Calling people out can be necessary.
Criticism isn’t cancellation. Disagreement isn’t cancellation. Accountability isn’t cancellation.
People often turn to public pressure because the institutions that should protect them have failed. When courts, employers or universities ignore misconduct, collective voices can be the only way to demand accountability. #MeToo is a powerful example. Having a platform doesn't mean everyone will agree with you. People are equally entitled to disagree, voice their criticism or choose not to support you..
But there’s a difference between holding someone accountable and creating an environment in which they’re no longer allowed any room to explain themselves, apologise or grow.
That’s where my problem begins.
As with most of the topics I write about, this one has approximately seventeen thousand subtopics. I would quite like someone to actually finish reading this article, so let’s focus on what concerns me most.
The village gossip circle: public judgement and self-censorship
Humans are social creatures. From an evolutionary perspective, belonging to a group was closely tied to survival, so it’s hardly surprising that we’re terrified of being rejected or humiliated.
The problem is that the environment has changed. Apparently, humanity invented the internet only to recreate the village gossip circle, except now the village has billions of people, screenshots and absolutely no closing time.
A post from years ago can resurface as though it happened yesterday. Our words travel far beyond the people we meant to reach, and context disappears along the way. We have no idea who will see them, how they’ll be read, or whether we’ll ever get to explain what we meant. When the consequences feel that unpredictable, staying quiet starts to seem like the safer option.
What worries me is how easily we mistake a viral narrative for the full story. Maybe it’s the law student in me, but I’m rather uncomfortable with how readily we treat a collection of social media posts as a complete case file. One person posts a take, another posts a response, and suddenly everyone is a judge, jury and unpaid member of the digital prosecution team.
And the evidence? A screenshot, a ten-second video and a caption that says, You need to know what this person did.
Well, excellent. Case closed, I suppose.
Sometimes there is enough information to justify a response. If a comedian makes an offensive joke, the organisers and audience are perfectly entitled to withdraw their support. But when strangers start sending abusive messages and digging through that comedian’s private life, we’re no longer talking about withdrawing support. We’re talking about a bullying mob. And we forget there’s an actual person behind the account.
The original issue becomes almost secondary. The focus shifts from addressing what happened to making sure the person suffers for it. At what point does accountability become humiliation? And who decides when enough is enough? The internet has an impressive memory for other people’s worst moments, even when the people sharing them have forgotten what started the whole thing.
Then there’s the problem that asking for context gets read as defending the behaviour. It isn’t. Wanting to understand what happened isn’t approving of it, and questioning one claim doesn’t mean rejecting every other claim. But when uncertainty is treated as a moral failure, people feel they have two options: agree with the prevailing opinion or risk becoming the next target.
That’s when self-censorship creeps in. Sometimes I spend longer deciding whether a sentence is socially acceptable than actually writing the bloody sentence.
Not every thought needs to be public, and privacy is a perfectly reasonable boundary. But there’s a difference between not sharing something because it’s private and not sharing it because you’re terrified of being misunderstood.
And yes, I’ve been part of the problem, too.
I’d love to pretend I’m writing this from some beautifully detached moral high ground. Unfortunately, I have an internet history, too.
I’ve reposted things without researching them and joined in with online criticism without asking whether I had the full picture. It’s incredibly easy: a few taps, and you’re done. No application form, no background check, no little pop-up asking whether you’ve actually read the original source. And when a post has millions of likes, it’s tempting to assume someone, somewhere, must have checked the facts.
But popularity isn’t proof. Confidence isn’t evidence. And a million people repeating the same claim doesn’t automatically make it true.
Eventually I started asking myself whether I actually knew enough to pass the judgement I was so ready to share. Sometimes, the honest answer was no.
It’s much easier to point at a mob than to admit you’ve occasionally been part of one. But if I believe context matters, that has to apply to me, too.
My own experience with controversial ideas
At school, I often wanted to contribute to a discussion but hesitated because the topic was controversial. I worried I’d be misunderstood and end up defending every word.
Then I decided to start small and wrote my Matura thesis on a controversial subject: the stigmatisation of prostitution in Germany. My German teacher, Frau Schreiber - someone I have a great deal of affection and admiration for, and who has always held a special place in my heart - pushed me to think critically about it. We even debated it in one of my oral exams, and we were clearly on opposite sides.
What mattered was that she gave me space to question assumptions and build my own argument. She didn’t require me to have the “right” opinion before letting me explore an idea. She treated asking questions as part of learning, not as a sign of bad character.
A classroom and the internet aren’t the same thing, and public speech has consequences. But we need spaces where people can ask questions, disagree and revise their views without every conversation becoming a test of their moral character. Sometimes people are wrong. Sometimes, through discussion, they change their minds. Isn’t that part of the point?
A little room to think out loud
I don’t think the answer is to stop criticising each other, or to say whatever we like and hide behind “people are too sensitive.” Our words can hurt, and sometimes criticism is necessary.
But I try to pause before reposting something and check where it came from. I try to distinguish between what I know, what I suspect and what I’ve simply seen repeated often enough to believe. And I think we need to leave room for uncertainty. Not every complicated situation has one entirely good side and one entirely evil one.
I was scared to start this blog because I knew someone might disagree with me. I still think carefully about what I publish, and some things are private for good reason. But I don’t want the possibility of being misunderstood to become the reason I never speak.
We don’t have to agree with each other. We don’t even have to like each other’s opinions. But if every difficult question becomes a test of someone’s moral character, we risk losing the ability to think out loud, change our minds and learn from one another.
And I’d rather risk someone disagreeing with me than spend my life silently editing myself into a person nobody could possibly object to.
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