> While you have a right of free speech, the rest of us have the right not to listen to you, nor to be forced to listen to you, nor to interact with you.
This conception of "cancelling" has little relation to how it actually happens, where the offending messages are often spread as far as possible first. If the goal is not to listen to someone, muting/blocking is almost always an option. Cancelling is trying to convince everyone else to shun the person as well often with misleading or reductive narratives about what they said/did and use of guilt by association.
My favourite example is Contrapoints getting cancelled for featuring a short VoiceOver by a controversial trans person[1] in a video.
This conception of "cancelling" has little relation to how it actually happens, where the offending messages are often spread as far as possible first. If the goal is not to listen to someone, muting/blocking is almost always an option. Cancelling is trying to convince everyone else to shun the person as well often with misleading or reductive narratives about what they said/did and use of guilt by association.
My favourite example is Contrapoints getting cancelled for featuring a short VoiceOver by a controversial trans person[1] in a video.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjMPJVmXxV8