Cancel culture went too far. What I think changes in 2026

Over the past decade, people have undeniably become more sensitive. In many ways, that shift was overdue. Things that were once brushed off or minimised deserved proper scrutiny, and it’s not a bad thing that people are more aware of power, language, harm, and imbalance.

But alongside that necessary awareness, something else grew with it.

Disagreement stopped being tolerated. Context stopped being interesting. And punishment slowly became the default response to almost everything.

Somewhere along the way, we moved from accountability to annihilation.

By the time COVID hit, the conditions were perfect for things to spiral. People were stuck at home, online constantly, bored, anxious, and consuming information at an unhealthy pace. Cancel culture didn’t start during that period, but it accelerated beyond anything resembling proportion. It went, quite frankly, feral.

People began losing jobs, reputations, and entire livelihoods over moments that, not that long ago, would have been handled privately, proportionately, or sometimes not at all. What was genuinely unsettling was not just the fallout, but the enthusiasm around it. The sense that destroying someone had become a form of entertainment.

Everything became a capital offence

What still strikes me most is the speed at which things escalate now.

This is not just about celebrities or big brands. Ordinary people are dragged into this constantly. Someone says something clumsy, behaves badly, has a bad day, or melts down publicly, and the response moves almost immediately towards total destruction.

Not criticism. Not accountability. Destruction.

People lose their jobs. Their partner’s small business gets targeted. Their families are dragged into it. Their children become collateral damage. All of this can happen off the back of a clip, a screenshot, or a paragraph written by someone who has already decided how the story should end.

At some point, it is reasonable to ask whether every wrongdoing genuinely warrants someone’s entire life being blown up.

There are obviously people who deserve to be removed from public life entirely. Diddy. Epstein. Jimmy Savile. Cancel the fucking lot of them. That is not controversial.

But when punishment is driven by ideological disagreement, partial information, or a single moment stripped of context, it stops resembling justice and starts resembling blood sport.

Everyone online behaves like they’re morally spotless

One of the most exhausting things about cancel culture is the tone it creates.

Online, people speak as though they have never put a foot wrong in their lives. As if they have never contradicted themselves, never acted in self-interest, never benefited from something they might now criticise in someone else.

That simply isn’t how real people function.

If you look closely enough at anyone, even the most politically correct person in the room, there will be choices they’ve made that someone else might reasonably disagree with. Something that suits them, benefits them, fits their life, and therefore feels fine to them.

That doesn’t make them evil. It makes them human.

What has changed is that this complexity is no longer extended to others. Nuance is allowed internally, but denied externally. Grace is something people give themselves, not each other.

Judging entire lives from scraps

Most cancellations now run off fragments.

A short video. A screenshot. A quote stripped of tone, timing, or history.

There is very little interest in what came before, whether something is a pattern or a one-off, or what that person might have been dealing with at the time. A thirty-second clip becomes enough to decide that someone is irredeemable.

It’s efficient. It’s emotionally satisfying. And it is very often wrong.

Once a narrative takes hold, correcting it becomes almost impossible. The truth arrives too late, if it arrives at all, and by then the damage has already been done.

Outrage does not disappear, it backfires

Cancel culture has not lost power because it stopped creating noise. It is losing power because noise no longer guarantees the outcome people expect.

The American Eagle campaign featuring Sidney Sweeney is a perfect example of this shift.

The backlash was loud and global. It dominated press, social media, and commentary for days. In pure PR terms, cancel culture handed American Eagle an extraordinary amount of free exposure, easily worth millions. Everyone was talking about it, whether angrily, defensively, or simply in confusion about why a brand was being dragged over a pun about “good genes”.

What mattered was not the outrage itself, but how it was handled.

American Eagle stood by the campaign. Sidney Sweeney did not apologise. There was no rushed statement, no grovelling clarification designed to appease the loudest voices online. The brand did not accept a narrative it did not recognise, because it was not the message it had put out.

In my experience, when brands come under fire, the instinct is almost always to apologise immediately. It feels safer. But apologies are admissions of guilt, and when you genuinely believe you have done nothing wrong, apologising rarely ends the backlash. It validates it.

American Eagle allowed the situation to run its course. The outrage faded. The brand benefited financially and reputationally from the attention. In a strange way, the very people trying to punish the brand amplified it.

That moment mattered. It showed that panic is not the only response available, and that outrage is not always something you need to kneel in front of.

Before COVID, there were warning signs

Long before cancel culture reached its current intensity, there were moments that hinted at where things were heading.

Formula 1’s decision to ban grid girls in 2018, following its acquisition by Liberty Media, is one of them.

The move was framed as progressive and necessary. What was largely absent from the conversation was the fact that the women involved chose that work. It was a dream job. They travelled internationally, earned significant money, and built careers around those roles.

They were not consulted.

The decision was not about consent or exploitation. It was about optics. A moral judgement made from above, applied to women who had already exercised agency.

I have spoken to women who lost those jobs. Some now earn substantially less, work in roles they dislike, and lost opportunities that had taken years to build. Not because they were mistreated or coerced, but because others decided they did not agree with their choice.

That moment matters because it predates the current climate. It shows how easily agency can be overridden when moral narratives become more important than lived reality.

Extremes used to be observed, not absorbed

When I was younger, extreme lives and beliefs were something you encountered through journalism. I remember watching Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends and being completely fascinated by it. Ultra-religious families. White supremacists. Porn actors. Cult-like environments. Lives that felt a million miles away from anything I recognised growing up in a small village in Surrey, well before the internet took over how we absorbed the world.

It was eye-opening because it was contained. You watched for an hour, learnt something, thought “that’s mental”, and then got on with your life. You were not expected to agree with it, defend it, or destroy the people involved. It was journalism doing what it was meant to do.

Now, everything exists on the same feed.

Extreme left collides with extreme right. Sexual liberation collides with moral panic. Tradwives document their traditional lives on TikTok, which is ironic in itself, while others respond with disproportionate outrage at women simply choosing a different structure for their lives.

What has disappeared is the ability to observe without personalising.

Choice, until someone chooses wrong

This contradiction shows up everywhere, but it is particularly brutal when it comes to women.

Be ambitious, but not threatening.
Be sexy, but not too sexy.
Be confident, but not intimidating.
Be independent, but not in a way that unsettles other women.

If a woman chooses a life that does not align with someone else’s ideology, that choice suddenly becomes suspect. The language shifts from empowerment to concern, from freedom to protection.

It is hard not to notice how often women end up policing other women, especially when resentment, jealousy, or moral superiority get involved.

Bodies are the next major battleground

Bodies have quietly become one of the most aggressive cultural battlegrounds, and it is only intensifying.

Public figures who were once celebrated for body positivity are now criticised, mocked, or accused of hypocrisy for losing weight or changing shape. The expectation appears to be permanence, as though a body, once publicly associated with a message, is no longer allowed to change.

Meghan Trainor is a perfect example of how warped this has become.

She was mocked and bullied online for losing weight, accused of betrayal because she released All About That Bass when she was 19. As if writing a song at that age permanently locks you into the same body for life.

When you actually say that out loud, it sounds ridiculous.

Trainor eventually addressed it directly, explaining that her weight loss was health-led. She has children now. She did not want to remain unhealthy to preserve a symbolic role for strangers on the internet. And she should not have to.

The idea that a woman should maintain a body that no longer serves her health, simply to make others feel better, is unreasonable. It turns real people into moral props.

There is also a fundamental misunderstanding of what body positivity was ever meant to be. It was never about promoting one body type over another. It was about dignity. About not hating yourself because of your body. Somewhere along the way, that got twisted.

Being morbidly overweight is not healthy. Being severely underweight is not healthy either. Both things can be true at the same time. We understood this in the 1990s, when ultra-thin bodies dominated media and were rightly criticised. What is confusing now is how easily we swung to the opposite extreme, where acknowledging obesity as a health issue became taboo.

Weight loss is also simply easier to achieve than it used to be. Medical interventions, medications, and cosmetic procedures have changed what is possible. That does not make those choices shallow or unethical, it makes them available. Availability always shifts aesthetics.

“Ozempic face” will likely become one of the most searched body-related terms next year, with people wildly speculating about procedures they do not understand. Many faces attributed to weight loss drugs are the result of buccal fat removal, ageing, or unrelated cosmetic work, but nuance rarely survives these conversations.

If body positivity genuinely means being positive about bodies, it has to include everyone. Larger bodies. Smaller bodies. Bodies that change. Otherwise it becomes body hierarchy.

I am a UK size 8. That is not a political statement. I did not choose my bone structure any more than someone else chose theirs. Being comfortable in your body should not come with conditions attached.

Journalism and the truth problem

There is a line often attributed to Mark Twain, “never let the truth get in the way of a good story”.

That line feels uncomfortably accurate now.

In the vast majority of cases I see, the public narrative is wrong. Not because people are stupid, but because stories are built to travel, not to be accurate. Allegation becomes implication. Implication becomes fact. Silence becomes guilt.

I have lost count of the number of conversations I have had with journalists who have written complete bullshit about a client, with no evidence. Sometimes it is word of mouth at a push. Sometimes it is someone they worked with decades ago who barely even knows them anymore.

When challenged, the question is rarely “can we prove this happened?” It is “can you prove it didn’t?”

When that question is turned back around, things often go very quiet.

That imbalance cannot hold forever. Evidence has to matter again, otherwise journalism loses the one thing that separates it from gossip.

What I think changes in 2026

Cancel culture is not disappearing. But its authority is weakening.

Brands and public figures are starting to recognise that online outrage often represents a very small, very loud group, amplified by algorithms. What feels overwhelming online does not always reflect reality offline.

People in the middle, which is most people, are tired. Tired of being told what to be angry about. Tired of moral pile-ons that feel detached from real life. Tired of watching people’s lives be destroyed for entertainment.

Family vlogging is likely to become increasingly taboo, with monetisation around child-focused content tightened and scrutinised more heavily.

Influencer power will continue to weaken as audiences grow bored, sceptical, and fatigued by constant certainty from people who are not experts.

AI-generated content will trigger at least one major reputational crisis, forcing a long-overdue reckoning around verification and trust.

Journalism will face louder scrutiny over sourcing, implication, and correction.

And perhaps most importantly, kindness needs to re-enter the conversation. Because behind every cancellation is a real human being. With a family. With mental health. With a life that exists beyond a screen.

The shouting will continue, but fewer people are listening.