Throughout the past couple of years, social media has been a platform to spread awareness about controversial topics. However, people can have a sticky situation from the past.

In earlier years, people could say controversial things or insensitive topics and not realize the impact it has on another person. From celebrities to the average person you can get “canceled” for acting out of ignorance based on homophobia, racism, and many more inconsiderate actions. 

The idea of “canceled” means the person should not be praised or idolized when being hurtful to others. Are these mistakes from the past or are they proving what the person is capable of? 

According to Harvard CAPS-Harris, 64% of Americans say cancel culture is a threat, while 36% disagreed. According to this statistic, the majority of people believe that Cancel Culture is threatening because people are capable of making a mess of someone’s life. It creates a toxic environment filled with white lies, revenge, and hate.

There is a difference between Cancel Culture and putting people in their place. Cancel Culture thrives off the idea of making a person’s life more difficult, but putting someone in their place is explaining how it was insensitive and what they can change in order to prove they are self-aware.

Cancel Culture is becoming more and more popular because everyone has the resources to dig up a person’s past. From Twitter to TikTok, people want to make it known what a person is capable of. They perpetuate this idea of ruining someone’s life based on a person’s ugly past or even present. 

Cancel Culture plays a part within many public figures by showing they should not be seen in the spotlight as a great person when in reality they are a terrible person. Although in an average student’s life, “canceled” could mean an email being sent to your family or possible disruptions from getting into your dream college or job.

“Cancel culture is horrible because it invokes society to get more and more sensitive. There is a certain beauty in bits of insensitivity that is lost when you have to police everything you put out into the world, for the fear of getting canceled,” said an anonymous high school student. 

According to the anonymous student, there are extreme ways to be insensitive and know it is wrong, but there are things that people pick and choose to be sensitive about. There are forms of canceling that are very flawed and viewed as reaching. Some people on social media only have the intention of ruining someone’s reputation and nitpick a situation when truly there is no case of insensitivity. 

People also love to fight fire with fire, creating a normalized environment for chaos. It is so simple to express hate through social media and destroy people’s reputations deeper than the surface level. It all starts with the idea of canceling a person based on ignorance, but people enjoy digging deeper into insecurities.

People should not have their life completely ruined based on mistakes, but there does need to be some form of reflection. Although if these inconsiderate actions are happening continuously, there have to be apologies made to people who were impacted in order to be respected. 

There is always room for improvement and growth. Having bad decisions define a person is no way to live. At every point in someone’s life, people will act with stupidity, there is no way to justify those actions. Society needs to encourage personal growth, rather than put people in a lower position than where they were to begin with.