Qualitative insights into cancel culture prevention, its potential individual impacts, and how to explore them

Abstract

The concept of cancel culture has gained traction over the past 10 years, with the continuous rise of social media and online platforms. The limited literature on this topic tends to focus on possible definitions and characteristics. However, we have yet to fully understand how cancel culture, canceling, and canceling prevention impact individuals and their lives. As such, we set out to build an empirical base that would allow us to delimit, understand, and study these individual impacts of cancel culture by proposing a new model—the pressure for a perfect conduct (PPC) model. We interviewed 20 people from different age groups to understand how cancel culture impacts their lives and which variables could be related to the pressure that derives from it. We also gathered data on their opinion regarding our proposed model and key variable, “PPC.” Our results seem to indicate that our model and the PPC variable can be used in the study of cancel culture’s individual impacts. Additionally, participants posited that this pressure negatively impacts individuals’ mental health, opinion construction, and social media participation. Furthermore, they reported that cancelling can be performed by and to anyone, not being limited to powerful figures. Further results and potential future studies are discussed. This work can help unlock future research on the topic by bringing forth a novel way to tackle it, as well as by exploring some of cancel culture’s implications at an individual level.