Internet Cancel Mobs

Recently, there was an explosive internet jihad against Hank Green. His alleged sin? Using AI to write part of a video script. While he denied that AI had written the script, he admitted that he’d used AI for research. This led to a bunch of random people on the internet going nuclear, because for a certain type of internet progressive, using AI for anything is about as bad as setting both your local art exhibit and river on fire. Green had to release an obsequious public apology and pledge to Do Better in the future.

If Hank Green used AI to write his script and then lied about it, that seems somewhat non-ideal. But certainly there’s nothing wrong with using AI for research. And even if Green used AI to write a script, his sin would be extremely minor compared to those that are ubiquitous among uncancelled celebrities.

So why was the public uproar directed at Hank Green so much more extreme than the uproar directed at far more controversial figures?

In another recent scandal, a fellow named Alex Meyers reviewed the movie Obsession. Some people on the internet didn’t like his review, and felt that it downplayed how bad the behavior of one of the main characters was. In total, he’s lost about 100,000 subscribers in just the last 30 days due to this earth-shattering scandal and was subjected to an insane online pile-on that got him to delete both his original video and another video apologizing for the original.

Again, why? Whatever you think of his movie review, making it is certainly much less wrong than, say, having an affair. And yet Meyers faced way more backlash than similarly notable figures who have affairs. What’s going on?

Let’s be a bit more precise. Hank Green is, by all accounts, much more palatable by the lights of the standard internet lefty than Destiny. Yet Green has, in the last few weeks, likely been subjected to a much more vicious internet pile-on than Destiny, even adjusted for their relative prominence. Why?

It seems that there are constantly these roving bands of internet leftists ready to absolutely demolish you for minor infractions against the orthodoxy (in many cases, their orthodoxy is rejected by nearly everyone who has ever lived). But I never see them, lots of public figures never see them, and even when writers make a career out of saying things that outrage lefties, they rarely seem to get it anywhere near as bad as random YouTubers who commit extremely minor and highly debatable slights. Why?

Here’s my explanation: left-wing cancel mobs, like cannibals or people who defect against their twin in prisoner’s dilemmas, tend to target their own. You can’t really get a cancel mob going against Richard Hanania, because his audience isn’t left-wing. You can try, and maybe get him fired if he’s at an academic institution. But by and large, there is very little overlap between those on hair-trigger alert for any minor malfeasance against the cause of social justice and those who read Richard Hanania’s articles.

When cancellations target right-wing figures, at most they get the targeted figure fired from their job, usually one filled with left-wingers. Nathan Cofnas was successfully hounded out of Cambridge, even though probably very little of his audience found his remarks problematic. But getting a grassroots mob of people unsubscribing from Cofnas’s substack would never work.

Cancellations generally only work by convincing the sorts of people who are sympathetic, in principle, to cancelling people. This is why leftists on the internet can get successful cancellations going against controversial left-wing figures but not controversial right-wing figures. The right-wing figures just don’t have the kind of audience that would ever go in for a cancellation against someone for saying controversial stuff.

Blocked and Reported, my favorite podcast, often covers online cancellations. Usually these are super weird. Often the thing that starts the cancellation is that someone with a name like bisexualgothmoose on Twitter alleges that someone in the online knitting community has been decentering BIPOC voices. This leads to a bizarre maelstrom of ephemeral allegations of misconduct, where everyone seems to agree that the accused has behaved very badly, but they’re all so tired y’all, so they can’t spell out her misconduct in detail.

The cancel mobs only target the woke, because they only occur in woke communities. Hank Green has many woke viewers. He must appease the wolves of wokeness. I do not have woke viewers in large numbers. Thus, I can say what I want. This is why some of the most unhinged and vicious cancellations occur in totally bizarre settings where ~100% of people are far-left, like communities of knitters and young adult novelists.

For a concrete case, consider the recent smear campaign against a Substacker named Spencer. The whole dispute is extremely complicated, so that after watching one thirty-minute video on the subject, I still don’t really get the full background, involving a diverse cast of characters, many of whom are accusing the others of misconduct. But from what I’ve gathered, the reason that thousands of people on the internet are hounding Spencer is that they released a video reacting to someone else’s video without watching it in full and also said to a black woman “you should know better.”

This is an extremely dumb thing to get mad at a person over. I say way more outrageous stuff on a daily basis. And yet because Spencer writes articles like Masc lesbians and The Dream Boyfriend complex and I write articles like Alan Hajek’s Destruction of Finite Frequentism, Spencer is subject to a big online pile-on of queer librarians calling them problematic, and I am not.

I’m nowhere near as controversial as Cofnas, but a cancellation attempt wouldn’t even work against me. My readers are mostly kind of heterodox liberals who are opposed, in principle, to cancelling people unless their offenses are very severe. If people tried to cancel me for writing controversial articles, my guess is this would backfire completely.

However, there is one group that I’ve been successfully cancelled by: the debate community. I’ve written more about this here, if you’re interested, but in short, the debate community is a mad echo chamber of leftist madness—where expressing standard liberal views is verboten. For this reason, I was pretty thoroughly cancelled in the debate community. I have friends who have been cancelled in debate for even dumber stuff.

I am one of the most hated people in the debate community. My sense is nearly everyone in debate who knows who I am is aware that I’m a controversial figure, but few are aware of my alleged sins. A close friend of mine said that before he and I had ever met, he’d heard that I was a former debater turned Nazi (ah yes, I, Matthew Adelstein, am a Nazi—very plausible!)

The reason I could be cancelled in debate, but I can’t be cancelled now, is that a large percentage of debaters have insane left-wing political views. Maoists run rampant in debate. It’s easy to get the Maoists to turn on a guy. They’re Maoists. That’s their main thing. But it’s harder to get heterodox liberals to go for the throat.

This is the thing to note about cancellations: they are mostly internal. They mostly involve the woke turning on their own. Usually, it’s for mild infractions related to race and gender partly because mild infractions are the only ones people in woke spaces regularly commit and partly because, for a certain kind of woke person, it’s hard to get outraged about anything else.