Dave and the Borrowers

Social Media Cancel Culture

Episode Summary

Dave, Savvy and Sam discuss the current climate of social media, cancel culture and how it impacted two authors: J.K. Rowling, whose comments on Twitter created a giant cancel meltdown and Blood Heir, a 2019 debut young adult novel by Amélie Wen Zhao, which was pulled befoe it could be published due to online outrage.

Episode Notes

CNBC News Article - JK Rowling critizices ‘cancel culture’ in open letter signed by 150 public figures

Cancel Culture: is an online shaming of individuals who have done or said something that angry social media users consider objectionable or offensive. 

→ Telling people to stop supporting businesses, people or brands or to stop buying from them / unfollowing them. Calling out people for their racist posts on social media and then demanding they be fired from their job. “Putting them on blast.”

• a way of demanding greater accountability from public figures who have committed or are accused of having committed some disqualifying moral transgression. “It’s an agreement not to amplify, signal boost, give money to,” Lisa Nakamura, a professor of media studies at the University of Michigan
• Credited to Black users of Twitter, cancellation has been said to share a lineage with mid century civil rights boycotts, insofar as it enables those with little political power to litigate perceived injustices in the more accessible forum of popular culture (the cancellation court of public opinion, if you will)
• People across a broad range of personal backgrounds and political beliefs have criticized the practice as an imperious tactic of imposing on everyone, including those with relatively little power, a predetermined point of view by force of public shaming instead of persuasion. The culture of cancellation, they say, violates the spirit, if not the actual laws, of free expression.
• The letter in question:
  •  warned of an “intolerant climate” for free speech. 
  • Signatories welcomed “needed reckonings” on racial and social injustice but argue that it has “intensified a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate.” 
    • *Is free speech against human rights different?
    • *Others become fearful of defending those who have been cancelled.
  • JKR said in a tweet “I was very proud to sign this letter in defence of a foundational principle of a liberal society: open debate and freedom of thought and speech.”
• Quotes from the letter:
  • “The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted,” the letter reads, condemning “a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity.”
  • “While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.”
    • *We are becoming more and more intolerant to opposing views but I believe it is because we are viewing these views as views that are against basic human rights. I believe people are simply defending these human rights. Ex: If you’re against gay marriage, you’re against the basic human right to marriage and maybe even love. 
  • The letter was spearheaded by the writer Thomas Chatterton Williams, who explained his motivations to The Times: “Donald Trump is the Canceler in Chief,” he said. “But the correction of Trump’s abuses cannot become an overcorrection that stifles the principles we believe in.”
• They go on to say President Donald Trump is a “real threat to democracy” but argue that “resistance must not be allowed to harden into its own brand of dogma or coercion.”
• What JKR Said:
  • Rowling, 54, published a blog post last month arguing that biological sex is real. It came after a tweet in which she took issue with an article referring to “people who menstruate”. “I’m sure there used to be a word for those people,” she tweeted sardonically. “Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?”