What Is Cancel Culture?

Modern Trends

Most people often believe the world has become modern, tolerant, and progressive as we are living in the 21st century. But this is a wrong belief. In ancient times and in many rural/tribal areas, there exists strict rules for all its citizens. If anyone violates the rules the community heads initiate severe punishments on the offenders and sometimes it can even be deadly. In the absence of any professional police and civil courts, the village heads and witch men are often the sole lawmakers. For smaller crimes, they may award lighter punishments that can be a form of social ostracism where everybody in the village is expected to shun the offender

The offender gets no help from anyone and cannot even use any of the village facilities like drinking water. Soon the offender and his family will be forced to leave the village on his own. Such direct ostracizing has disappeared in most places due to the police and courts. However, ostracism of a different kind has started in the online world, especially by social media companies. When social media companies started decades ago they were formed to speak and write freely. However, this freedom was misused by many and a lot of fake news, threats, vulgarity, etc., started getting uploaded. Slowly, the social media companies started removing them but it was a manual process. Nowadays, they use massive software and algorithms to detect harmful content and the abusive user gets suspended, either temporarily or permanently.