In recent times, being on the Internet has been a mixed opportunity for negotiating compliance with and challenging acceptance of the norms and values, similar to what is available in the physical sphere, where people are expected to create, abide by, and be challenged for violating specific norms and values of a community. While people in the physical sphere can only be rebuked for violating existing norms and values in confined spaces, the emergence of new technologies has shifted the restrictive nature of correcting cultural and moral violators to a more widespread arena, where the targets are easily criticised with the intention of holding them accountable for their actions.
Aside from having cancel culture as the central concept, which is the calling out of prominent people or celebrities on social media platforms based on their violation of norms and values, scholars have also used cancelling, cancelled, and cancelation at various points of explaining the main concept. Cancelling, according to various sources, means a constant rebuke of cancel culture targets. This happens most often when the issues being used to cancel the targets are still fresh. Cancelled, on the other hand, represents the consequences of canceling, which could be a loss of followers and/or fans or a loss of promotion deals by the targets. Cancellation is defined as “a ritualistic practice of publicly negotiating and performing structural tensions.”
Cancel culture creation and management
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It is also important to understand that cancel culture cannot exist unless celebrities or stalkers are the creators of the content that sparked it. Kanye West, for example, was recently blocked by Instagram and Twitter for antisemitic posts that the social networks claimed violated their policies. While the providers of social networking sites appear to be protecting the public’s right and safeguarding their businesses, canceling from fan perceptions of interpersonal slights or insults resonates with West’s case. Kanye West’s post drew a lot of backlashes from his fans, and top companies suspended various promotion deals as a result.
In other words, fans frequently judge celebrities for their misbehavior. While Kanye West was unlucky to have fans who supported him in his actions, Tiwa Savage, a Nigerian popular singer whose sex video tape was recently leaked by a stalker, had fans who supported her. Fans accused the stalker of exposing her private life and infringing on her sexual rights. In the case of Kanye West, some scholars have described it as anti-fan activism, which typically emerges as a result of sexual and racial discrimination. In both cases, it means that celebrities’ private and legal “inactions” may be met with more supportive fan activism than actions aimed at demoralizing a specific race or group.
Sustainability factors and its consequences
Our analyst observes that in recent years, emerging technologies have served as a conduit for cancel culture around the world. Because of the lack of “immediate gatekeepers” associated with legacy media, it is a culture that pervades all digital platforms. In Nigeria, for example, bloggers are known for publishing gossip or fake news about celebrities in order to incite rivalry, and fans are fond of calling out social media influencers whenever government officials fail to provide an enabling environment for the youth to thrive. As a result, what mainstream media cannot report is covered and disseminated by popular media.
When one examines cancel culture from various angles and cases, it is clear that there are winners and losers. Celebrities may benefit when it is initiated by them for reasons known to them but unknown to the general public. When this occurs, the gain could be mixed – having more followers, targets apologizing, and refocusing attention on solving social problems, which has been described as “attention economy.”
According to the Nigerian cases, cancel culture is being amplified by social media and is effective in addressing some social causes. In the case of Tiwa Savage, for example, fans heavily used Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to positively frame her. This was also achieved in a negative pattern in the case of Ronke Raji, a social media influencer, who was accused of failing to use her platform to amplify the voices of young people.
This, according to our analyst while making reference to some scholars, is a threat to the foundation of liberal discourse within democracies (a set of witch hunts). As a result, in the name of canceling people for not doing what is “normal,” they are being denied their freedom of free speech in a digitalized world where the owners of technologies for initiating and practicing culture are also struggling with accepting morality and accountability construction by users of others.