Recently, there’s been a huge surge of web-based accusations to hundreds of content creators across the globe. Whether it be James Charles, Kevin Hart, or James Gunn, there is always a furious flame burning in the Twitter and Youtube community. Is it worth fueling the fire? Do people know what they’re igniting?

Take ProJared on Youtube for example. After publicly announcing the divorce of his wife, his former spouse spun loads of stories of adultery, abuse, and manipulation and shared them online. The drama eventually escalated into countless memes mocking Jared, several claims of sexual misconduct against minors, and being cast away from the YouTube community. Despite all these claims, there’s a hole in the accuser’s statements.

Most of the people who ganged up on him had no idea what they were talking about. All of the claims had little to no concrete evidence to back them up, yet if you look back, there are countless posts and comments expressing distress to events that weren’t even proven. These claims were proven wrong with a mountain of evidence in a 40-minute video uploaded to his channel.

This blind hatred and unguided accusations are the essences of cancel culture. In fact, the culture as a whole is based on misinformation.

Cancel culture didn’t become a trend because it helped anything, it became a trend because it’s a tool to bring other people down without risk of charges brought against them, or any sort of backlash. People don’t use hashtags like “#_______isoverparty” to try and fix a situation. They do this so they can tear people down, ruin their careers, make them feel bad, and do anything in their power to get their anger across.

People will blindly follow others if it means they can feel like they’re part of someone else’s downfall. It gives them power and it boosts their self-esteem in a way that makes them able to claim they were fighting for a good reason to combat bad behavior, but in reality, they just wanted to accuse someone.

All in all, cancel culture makes situations worse. It doesn’t matter if accusations are true or not. When drama builds around situations, it hurts everyone involved even more. The more intense the cancellation, the more hurt people will be. Cancel culture is a weaponized attack against people with usually no concrete evidence to back it up. Most evidence used in claims consists of fabricated tweets, text messages, stories, or all of the above. 

For the betterment of society and to uphold justice in it, we as a community should be mindful of situations before accusing people left and right. That in itself is how real justice can be done.