Cancel culture, hypocrisy, and the collapse of proportion

There are people who should be cancelled. Unequivocally. Without hesitation or caveat. When harm is proven, when victims exist, when criminal behaviour has been established through evidence rather than speculation, removing power, platforms, and public legitimacy is not a cultural overreaction, it is accountability.

Figures such as Jimmy Savile or Rolf Harris were not victims of online hysteria. They were individuals whose behaviour caused real, sustained harm and whose actions were hidden for years by institutional silence. When the truth emerged, public condemnation was not only appropriate, it was overdue. These cases are not morally complex, nor are they examples of cancel culture run amok. They involve clear wrongdoing, corroborated evidence, and real victims.

The problem is not that society became more willing to call out genuine harm. That shift was necessary. The problem is that the definition of what now warrants cancellation has expanded so far that it no longer bears any relationship to severity, evidence, or proportionality.

Cancel culture was once framed as a response to extreme and proven misconduct. Today, it is increasingly applied to behaviour that is ordinary, unresolved, or deeply human.

From accountability to certainty

Somewhere along the way, scrutiny became certainty. Allegation became conclusion. Discomfort became guilt. Disagreement became moral failure.

The principle of innocent until proven guilty still exists in law, but culturally it has all but disappeared. Accusation is now treated as sufficient evidence, and the absence of immediate denial or explanation is framed as confirmation. The process has become inverted. Outcomes are demanded before facts are established, and nuance is interpreted as complicity.

From a professional perspective, this shift is particularly striking. In my work, it is still surprisingly common to see allegations surface privately long before anything reaches the press, often from angry former partners, estranged family members, or obsessive fans. In many of these cases, the individual being accused is able to provide clear evidence that the claims are false, exaggerated, or financially motivated. It is not unusual for threats to follow, demands for money to be made, or explicit warnings that the story will be taken to journalists if certain conditions are not met.

This is often the point at which I irritate friends. I have a habit of reminding them, usually to their frustration, that they do not know what has happened behind the scenes when condemning someone based on accusations alone. That instinct is not about defending bad behaviour or dismissing genuine harm. It is about recognising how frequently the public version of a story omits crucial context, prior disputes, failed attempts at leverage, or evidence that directly contradicts the allegation.

Once an accusation becomes public, very little of that complexity survives. The audience rarely sees what came before, or what was disproved, or what motivations were at play. By the time a story reaches the public domain, the assumption of guilt has often already settled.

A single article, an unnamed source, a disgruntled former partner, or a clipped video can now trigger reputational collapse. This is not because proof has been established, but because audiences have been conditioned to equate suspicion with truth. The language of justice is invoked, while the standards of justice are quietly abandoned.

This is not accountability. It is conviction without process.

What we now cancel people for

The most telling indicator that something has gone wrong is not the existence of cancellation, but what now qualifies for it.

Public figures are increasingly being cancelled for behaviour that, outside the spotlight, would be considered unremarkable. Messy breakups. Poor communication in relationships. Emotional immaturity. Conflicting accounts of private disputes. Clumsy language. Failing to behave perfectly during moments of stress, grief, or conflict.

These are not crimes. They are not abuses of power. They are not evidence of moral corruption. They are, for better or worse, part of everyday life.

Most people have experienced these situations personally. Many have caused hurt unintentionally. Many have been the villain in someone else’s story. The difference is that most people are allowed to navigate these moments privately, without an audience, and without permanent digital records.

Public figures are not afforded that grace. Their mistakes are not contextualised, they are flattened. Their humanity is not examined, it is judged.

Moral superiority and the refusal of proportion

This is where hypocrisy enters the equation, not because people are flawed, but because they refuse to acknowledge how ordinary much of this behaviour actually is.

Online, people speak with extraordinary certainty about situations they do not fully understand, involving people they do not know, based on fragments of information they would never accept if applied to their own lives. This is not about silencing judgement. Judgement is human. Opinion is inevitable.

The issue is proportionality.

We are now applying the harshest social punishment available to behaviour that would not justify it in any other context. Emotional imperfection is treated as moral failure. Private conflict is reframed as public danger. The punishment bears no resemblance to the alleged offence.

This is not moral clarity. It is moral inflation.

Performative outrage and professional scepticism

Perhaps this is where my own perspective colours the analysis. After years of working in crisis communications, speaking to people behind closed doors, and having sat in rooms where the offline reality looks nothing like the online narrative, it becomes difficult not to notice patterns.

Exposure changes how you see things. You see how stories are simplified. You see how complex interpersonal situations are reduced to heroes and villains. You see how quickly nuance evaporates once outrage becomes profitable.

That experience has made me sceptical of the kind of social media activism that consists almost entirely of reposting, resharing, and visibly aligning with whatever issue dominates the cycle that week. This does not mean such activism is always insincere. Many people care deeply and act in good faith. It would be dishonest to deny that.

But intention and behaviour do not always align.

What is often striking is how carefully managed that outrage appears. The language is familiar. The framing is safe. The risk is minimal. Rarely is anything said that might complicate the narrative or invite genuine disagreement. The activism is visible, but the personal cost is negligible.

There is a difference between caring about an issue and broadcasting care as part of an identity. One is driven by conviction. The other by perception. In an environment where moral alignment functions as social currency, it is reasonable to question how often outrage becomes image management rather than engagement.

From celebrities to civilians

One of the most serious developments in recent years is that cancel culture no longer targets only those who have chosen public life. Increasingly, it reaches into the lives of ordinary people who have no institutional power, no public platform, and no protection.

Historically, public shaming, however crude or unfair, was largely confined to those who had entered the public sphere. Musicians, actors, broadcasters, and politicians were subjected to scrutiny as part of an unspoken, if uncomfortable, contract with visibility. That boundary no longer exists.

Today, anyone can become a subject of mass judgement.

A video that circulated widely online illustrates this shift clearly. A woman was walking down the street when a content creator attempted to force her into a street interview. She did not engage. She tried to continue on her way. When the filming persisted, she eventually reacted with irritation and told the person to leave her alone.

That reaction, removed from context, was clipped and uploaded. Strangers identified her. Her employer was traced. Accusations were made about her character, including claims of racism, based entirely on a fragment of an interaction that most people would recognise as a moment of human frustration after being harassed.

What is striking about situations like this is not the behaviour of the person filmed, but how recognisable it is. Most people, when followed and recorded without consent while trying to go about their day, would eventually respond with annoyance or anger. There is nothing exceptional about that reaction. What is exceptional is the scale of punishment that now follows.

Living in public and the expectation of restraint

This is not theoretical. Living in central London, it is impossible to avoid the proliferation of street interviewers and content creators filming in public. These interactions are rarely consensual. They rely on persistence rather than participation.

There is an unspoken expectation that everyone should want to be involved. If you hesitate, ignore them, or attempt to walk on, the behaviour often escalates. People are followed. Cameras remain pointed. Questions are repeated. The aim is not conversation, but reaction.

Most people do not want to be involved in a stranger’s TikTok channel. They are walking to work, walking their dog, running errands, or simply trying to exist without being filmed. That reluctance should be unremarkable. Instead, it is treated as resistance to be overcome.

The calculation is simple. Calm refusal does not perform well. Frustration does. The easiest content to monetise is someone eventually saying what they are thinking, which in many cases is simply to tell the person filming them to leave them alone.

As a result, there is a constant pressure to self-edit. You moderate your behaviour pre-emptively. You choose politeness over honesty. You suppress a reasonable response because you know that saying what you actually feel could be uploaded, reframed, and circulated without context.

In effect, you have to be PR-trained simply to walk down the street.

Consent without protection

The most troubling aspect of this dynamic is the absence of meaningful recourse. Filming in public is legal. Consent is not required. There is no obligation to seek permission, no requirement to blur faces, and very limited ability to prevent upload once footage exists.

This creates a profound imbalance. The person filming controls the narrative. They decide what is shown, what is cut, and how it is framed. The person filmed absorbs the risk. If a clip gains traction, the consequences do not remain online. They spill into real life, affecting employment, safety, and mental health.

What is often described casually as content creation is, in practice, a form of unregulated intrusion. The fact that it is legal does not make it ethical, and it does not make it harmless.

Monetisation and the loss of restraint

This expansion of cancel culture has been accelerated by money. Outrage is no longer confined to newspapers or broadcasters. Anyone can profit from it.

Influencers, micro-influencers, YouTubers, and anonymous accounts can now build platforms by reacting to, dissecting, and condemning others. These are not necessarily professional commentators. Many are ordinary people with full-time jobs who have discovered that outrage is reliable, repeatable content.

When condemnation becomes monetisable, restraint disappears. There is no incentive to wait, to verify, or to contextualise. Resolution does not perform. Nuance does not convert. Escalation does.

The imbalance of risk

Those being filmed and judged risk their reputations, livelihoods, and safety. Those filming and commenting often risk nothing.

Anonymous accounts can speculate freely. Creators can provoke without consequence. Accusations spread faster than corrections, and when narratives later unravel, there is rarely any mechanism for repair.

This asymmetry is structural. It is what allows cancel culture to expand unchecked.

The collapse of proportion

When the harshest social punishment is applied to ordinary human behaviour, cancel culture ceases to function as accountability. It becomes a system that disciplines imperfection.

Not every mistake is a crime. Not every accusation is true. Not every private failure deserves public punishment. When these distinctions collapse, genuine abuse is diluted, and real victims are lost in a sea of outrage about comparatively trivial behaviour.

This does not produce a more ethical culture. It produces a fearful one.

The question is not whether people should be held accountable. It is whether we are still capable of distinguishing between genuine harm and the uncomfortable reality that humans are flawed, inconsistent, and rarely as tidy as the internet demands.

That distinction matters. Without it, cancel culture is no longer about justice at all.