> Cancel culture are witch hunts organized > over social media. I can't take the teeth-gnashing over the "culture" aspect of "cancel culture" seriously, t

> Cancel culture are witch hunts organized > over social media. I can't take the teeth-gnashing over the "culture" aspect of "cancel culture" seriously, though plenty of people I respect do (eg: Yascha Mounk, Matt Taibbi, Noam Chomsky). The actual problem is social media, much more than culture. Social media flattens all the world's events, without regard to their relevance. Does it alarm me if a professor or police officer loses their job because they say the "wrong" thing? You know, not really, in the vast majority of cases. And I'm glad that such a culture results in, for example, Twitter "mobs" reliably doxxing right-wing extremists. Where I see an actual problem is in the scope. There's a difference between someone losing their job over an isolated incident of poor judgement, and someone losing their job and being hounded by outraged people from all corners of the globe, and gaining a life-long bad reputation. On an ideally-designed internet, "cancel culture" would exist, but not be a problem, because its reach would scale according to the behaviour, and the importance of the person. Some random person in a tiny town does not merit as much scrutiny as an elected official, but currently, they may get it anyhow. The problem is the design of social media.