The questions are to be answered on the basis of what is stated or implied in the passage. Choose the most appropriate response that accurately and completely answer the question.
Within the turbulent past few years, the idea that a person can be “cancelled” — in other words, culturally blocked from having a prominent public platform or career — has become a polarizing topic of debate. The rise of “cancel culture” and the idea of cancelling someone coincides with a familiar pattern: A celebrity or other public figure does or says something offensive; a public backlash, often fuelled by politically progressive social media, ensues. Then come the calls to cancel the person — that is, to effectively end their career or revoke their cultural cachet, whether through boycotts of their work or disciplinary action from an employer.
To many people, this process of publicly calling for accountability, and boycotting if nothing else seems to work, has become an important tool of social justice — a way of combating, through collective action, some of the huge power imbalances that often exist between public figures with far-reaching platforms and audiences, and the people and communities their words and actions may harm.
But conservative politicians and pundits have increasingly embraced the argument that cancel culture, rather than being a way of speaking truth to power, has spun out of control and become a senseless form of social media mob rule. At the 2020 Republican National Convention, for example, numerous speakers, including President Trump, addressed cancel culture directly, and one delegate resolution even explicitly targeted the phenomenon, describing it as having “grown into erasing of history, encouraging lawlessness, muting citizens, and violating free exchange of ideas, thoughts, and speech.”
Actually, ending someone’s career through the power of public backlash is difficult. Few entertainers or other public figures have truly been cancelled — that is, while they may have faced considerable negative criticism and calls to be held accountable for their statements and actions, very few of them have truly experienced career-ending repercussions.
Harry Potter author, J.K. Rowling, for example, has faced intense criticism from her own fans since she began to voice transphobic beliefs, making her one of the most prominently “cancelled” individuals at the centre of the cancel culture debate. But following Rowling’s publication, in June 2020, of a transphobic manifesto, sales of the author’s books actually increased tremendously in her home country of Great Britain.