Most of us use social media, no matter how much we try to deny it. It’s the fastest way to get quick news, the fastest way to be informed about what’s going on in our world. Social media has its beauty because of the way that it keeps people aware and locked in with their surroundings. But anything that deals with social media, there’s always a con to it. Since social media keeps us so informed, bad news spreads like wildfires. Any information especially controversial can also be misleading and false and spread at lightning speed and be extremely disastrous.

The infamous concept of cancel culture. It’s a silly but serious risk all influencers face nowadays and has every person under the public eye shaking in their boots. Anything is able to surface on the internet now, anything can be found in the deepest parts of the internet. It’s not hard for anybody to resurface any of your old Tweets, messages, videos, etc. For the few fortunate ones not aware of the meaning of “cancel culture,” it’s about the huge withdrawal of support from an influencer or celebrity’s fanbase due to controversial actions deemed unacceptable from society’s scolding eye. Now, cancel culture used to be a political term but people on social media have adopted it as a way of taking status away from people they think aren’t right in their eyes.

Cancel culture is useful to inform people on their favorite celebrities’ wrong behavior like racism, sexism, homophobia, colorism, or lack of censorship in speech. However, cancel culture can also deny someone of their freedom of speech and ability to express what they really want to say. Something someone might say won’t always be in your certain taste, but you can’t silence someone just because you disagree with what they say. Cancel culture is controversial on its own, even if it was created with “good” intentions.

Let’s take for example, Kanye West (known as Ye). As controversial Ye can be, especially with his comments involving antisemitism, he’s also a victim of being denied freedom of speech. In his diss track “Eazy,” he said, “God saved me from that crash just so I can beat Pete Davidson’s a**.” He was apparently “canceled” and people called controversy on that when every rapper has dissed someone at least once in their songs? Kanye was already on a roll with his support of some of Trump’s statements, people came at his head for every single thing. Or even when the queen died and he posted on his Instagram story, “LONDON I KNOW HOW YOU FEEL, I LOST MY QUEEN TOO.”

Most people on Twitter laughed but there’s always gonna be those people who take everything to heart or just complain about every little thing. Cancel culture is unfair like that, and society picks and chooses who they wanna cancel. Sometimes carefully and sometimes irresponsibly. It depends on what crowd this person’s actions brought and the severity of their actions. Everybody is afraid to be infected with the disease of being canceled, saying something controversial or listening to the wrong person can have someone looking at you nastily.

Cancel culture is as toxic as it sounds. Is it a concept that’ll ever disappear from social media? Who knows. It’s been about seven years since cancel culture became a thing, surfacing around social media, and who knows how long it’ll live for. Until then, I’ll be filtering my playlist every time someone gets canceled and being wary of my surroundings when I decide to secretly listen to them.