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Six signs you're being canceled... Today, fortuitously, I'm writing a book chapter on canceling and free speech. Here is a mini-excerpt from the latest draft... @Yascha_Mounk @jessesingal @kittypurrzog 1/12
In real life, the line between criticizing someone and canceling her is often fuzzy and subjective. In practice, cases can be hard. Shouting “canceling!” profligately makes you part of the problem. 2/12
How to tell the difference? When are you being canceled, as opposed to criticized? Here are what I think are some good tests... 3/12
• Punitiveness: Does what is being said to or about you have the goal or foreseeable effect of jeopardizing your livelihood or isolating you socially? Are people denouncing you to your employer, your professional groups, your social connections? 4/12
• Deplatforming: Are campaigners attempting to prevent you from publishing your work, giving speeches, attending meetings? Are they claiming that allowing you to be heard is violence against them or makes them unsafe? 5/12
• Grandstanding: Is the tone of the discourse ad hominem, hysterical, repetitive, ritualistic, posturing, accusatory, outraged? Are people flattening distinctions, demonizing you, slinging inflammatory labels, and engaging in moral one-upsmanship?...6/12
...Are people ignoring what you actually say and talking about you but not to you? 7/12
• Organization: Does the energy directed toward you appear to be organized and targeted? Are the organizers working to recruit others to pile on? Are people systematically picking through your work or scouring social media to find ammunition to use against you? 8/12
• Secondary boycotts: Is there an explicit or implicit threat that anyone who supports you will get the same treatment that you are receiving? Are people fearful of supporting or defending you? Are they doing rhetorical backflips to distance themselves from you?...9/12
...Are their public positions inconsistent with what they tell you privately? 10/12
• Truthiness: Are the things being said about you inaccurate, and do the people saying them seem not to care? Do they feel at liberty to distort your words, ignore corrections, and make false accusations, in the name of pursuing some larger truth or social good? 11/12
If you are encountering those tactics, you are being canceled. If you are engaging in them, please stop. 12/12
