What is cancel culture and what are its positive and negative impacts?

Cancel culture can be defined as a collective effort of society, especially netizens, to withdraw support from a public figure or company after they say or do something considered unpleasant or offensive. Usually, someone is canceled because of past actions like committing sexual harassment, violating current justice norms, or making racist comments.

Cancel culture involves halting support for any work or output from the public figure. This is often done by taking a photo, showing it, labeling it, then condemning and embarrassing the person in public through social media.

The cancel culture phenomenon actually has positive and negative sides. From a positive perspective, cancel culture encourages public figures to be more careful in their actions and words. This is because cancel culture gives the public the power to influence and apply social sanctions to problematic public figures. Cancel culture can also be a mobilizing tool for society to direct a problem into the legal realm or hold individuals accountable for their actions.

One of the most well-known examples of cancel culture is the Me Too Movement regarding the sexual harassment case committed by Harvey Weinstein. This example proves that even the most powerful, famous, and influential people can be punished. With this movement, sexual violence survivors gained the courage to speak up.

However, many believe that cancel culture has more destructive than positive effects. People who are targeted by cancel culture can be ostracized, have their accounts taken down, and their reputation damaged. As a result, in addition to their reputation being destroyed, their work contracts are often terminated. The future of someone who is targeted can be ruined in one day.

The problem is that cancel culture makes netizens forget the positive things that someone has done. Netizens are unwilling to forgive and give second chances to the person concerned to be better. Or netizens actually dig up someone's past mistakes. As happened in America, a university trustee was forced to resign because he once wore a Nazi costume to a university party decades ago. Or a student was rejected from Harvard because he once wrote racist words in high school.

The effect is that if cancel culture attacks celebrities, their works are closed off to the public even though those works could be positive and have economic potential.

The problem is that cancel culture can lead people to easily judge or blame someone without knowing the whole problem. This is contrary to the principle of innocence. Cancel culture can silence individuals who have different opinions because they are afraid of being ostracized or attacked for their opinions and leads individuals to follow the majority's opinion. As a result, we lose the opportunity to listen to opinions from different perspectives.

In South Korea, cancel culture is also not a new phenomenon. For Korean celebrities, getting involved in scandals is the same as a career death. Scandal cases that most often happen to Korean artists are usually related to drug use, legal violations, and sexual harassment. If a scandal is revealed, netizens will attack the person's social media account with condemnation and insults. The artist usually has no choice but to go on hiatus from all work or withdraw permanently from the entertainment industry. There are also those who are forced to retire from the entertainment industry due to serious scandal issues. If scandal cases like this happen, artists will usually release an official apology and go on hiatus until the issue calms down.