I feel like we need a taxonomy of cancel culture. Let's start with 4 categories:
1) deciding to stop supporting/associating with someone OR 2) causing someone to lose their job or face a similar concrete punishment
FOR
3) doing something bad OR 4) expressing an opinion

So a 1-3 ("I can't listen to R Kelly anymore") or a 1-4 ("I'm taking JK Rowling's name off my Harry Potter fansite") seem to me completely non-problematic personal choices

A 2-3 might be broadly acceptable to most people (news show fires famous sexual harasser) or considerably less so (company fires non-famous woman after newspaper reports that she did blackface at a party)

2-4 is where most of the actual non-disingenuous debate takes place, where (to oversimplify) cries of "free speech" meet those of "accountability". You know the arguments so I won't rehash them. My point is these really are 4 different phenomenon and should be discussed as such

Of course, there's debate in the margins of each of these. For instance, when a professor is investigated but not sanctioned for an alleged offense does the investigation itself damage them enough to be considered punishment?

You can probably think of more complicating examples. What one person might consider expressing an opinion another people might call doing something bad. Please feel free to very much not go into depth on these in my mentions.

But overall it really distorts any useful discussion when these 4 categories get conflated. This is the point I want to make. (And that's before you even get to people who just call any criticism "cancel culture," but that's just bullshit.)

Yep this is one of the things I was alluding to above https://twitter.com/Jesselansner/status/1286311115434188800?s=20