My take on cancel culture

When I first saw this topic, I was like "What is this one again?" That's because I have never heard of the term "cancel culture" and initially I thought it was all about stopping some archaic cultural practices but after reading the description, I realized it was something else. My first instinct was to not bother writing on it since I don't know what it means but I never really like the idea of missing out on any weekly prompt topic, so I decided to just ask Google and I discovered I actually know the phenomenon around cancel culture but never realized that it even has a name.

According to dictionary.com, cancel culture is "the phenomenon or practice of publicly rejecting, boycotting, or ending support for particular people or groups because of their socially or morally unacceptable views or actions." If you're a frequent user of social media, you must have come across this phenomenon and I have seen a lot of it just this year alone. The recent one I saw is an incident that happened during the recent MET gala where a TikTok star called Haleyy Baylee got cancelled because she said "Let them eat cake."

Just that phrase triggered a lot of TikTokers and everyone started calling for people to unfollow her on all social media platforms. And you wouldn't believe why those people are all angry; they said she used that phrase just to mock poor people all over the world. I was actually angry when I was following up with the whole thing and seeing people's illogical comments on the matter. There's a long history behind that phrase which I wouldn't want to go into right now but you can do more research on it if you're interested.

From what I saw, Hayley used that phrase because she was dressed like the original owner of the phrase; Marie Antoinette. There was no ulterior motive behind it, she just said it to fit into the character of Marie Antoinette but TikTokers didn't care about that, they wanted her head for using the phrase. Her followers dropped by millions and you know the crazy thing? This treatment also spread across to other celebrities, especially those who attended the MET gala. People were calling for these celebrities to be cancelled because they live a lavish lifestyle while people around the world are struggling to buy food.

From the way I'm taking this, you can already see my stance on this whole cancel culture of a thing (or maybe a glimpse of it). People call it cancel culture but I call it cyberbullying fueled by herd mentality. One thing I realized from Haleyy Baylee's case is that many people who are on her neck because of what she said don't even know the meaning of the phrase "Let them eat cake", they just see a large number of TikTokers reacting negatively to it and they just jump on the trend without thinking much about it, and that's where the herd mentality comes in (also known as the bandwagon effect).

It's crazy that people are getting triggered by a phrase used by someone in the medieval era and suddenly they want to start a revolution against all celebrities because they are having fun while other people are suffering, now you can see why their argument is downright ridiculous. So celebrities shouldn't enjoy their money anymore because there are poor people in the world? "Oh these celebrities are buying tickets for the MET gala which is very expensive and they can't feed hungry people", this is coming from people who haven't donated a single penny to their poor neighbours.

Another cancel culture that trended on social media these past couple of months is the boycott of Starbucks and this one was huge because there were protests everywhere. I'm not going to go into the details of this one but it had something to do with the Israel-Palestine war and this is another cancel culture I didn't agree with because it just doesn't make any sense to me. Another similar one is the McDonald's boycott and this one greatly affected their business as a lot of people stopped patronizing them. You can research more on all these if you're interested in them.

I have never seen anything good come out from all the cancel cultures I have seen and I start wondering why people even bother with them in the first place. Maybe the person or business loses a few followers or customers but things go back to normal within a few days or weeks. It's typical of how things are run on social media; something trends for a couple of days and is suddenly forgotten after that, looking like it never even trended in the first place. Nobody is talking about Haleyy Baylee anymore and her followers that dropped during that period have gone up again.

Starbucks and McDonald's are still in business and their sales have probably gone up after the whole revolution. I will always see cancel culture as something that doesn't make any sense even though there are cases where it might be a good thing, the bad cases far outweigh that. People come up with a lot of crazy things just for clout and other people ride on the trend without knowing the reason behind it. Some people were screaming "boycott Starbucks" back then but when you ask them why, they can't give a reasonable answer. They just want to boycott it because other people were doing the same

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