By Skylar KAN
If you’re a YouTube celebrity who earns over $1 million every year, being canceled could be the very first thing you want to avoid. But how can you prevent or survive the cancellation?
Who is Shane Dawson?
Shane is known for being a writer, actor and YouTuber with 3 YouTube channels accumulating over 30 million subscribers and more than 4 billion views. His content varies from conspiracy theories, vlogs, skits to documentary series. Shane was once a successful content creator with over half a billion views in only 1 year when he just started YouTube.
The bigger they are, the harder they fall.
Shane was under a backlash against his offensive videos from the past. Those include doing the blackface, saying the N-word, spreading murder fantasies and even joking about pedophilia. Although he had apologized many times before, people kept bringing it up once in a while. This time, he finally got canceled “officially”.
Youtube demonetized his Youtube channels, removing him from the community. This is the very first time I’ve ever seen YouTube “banning” such a big channel. I’m not sure if it’s correct for YouTube to take part in the cancellation. But I wonder what took YouTube so long to “cancel” Shane. Why did they do it at this period of time? Maybe big companies are just following the public opinion to make their moves? If Youtube did this purely due to their community policies, they could have done it years ago.
Shane is posting again this October. Did he survive the cancellation?
In my opinion, no. Some on Reddit said Shane can get back to YouTube ”professionally” but not “socially”. I see their point, but YouTube is all about community. If society can’t endure him anymore, there’s no way he could continue his profession on social media. Moreover, his views dropped drastically.
Shane used to make excuses for his offensive acts as those were just jokes. Those who didn’t get offended said they thought those jokes were actually funny. However, I believe it was even worse as he was normalizing it, making people think it’s ok to joke around offensive topics like racism.
I am worried that cancel culture would become a tool for people to remove their competitors. The cancellation of Shane will be a “precedent case”. With the help of YouTube, people witness the power of “cancel culture”, destroying one’s career and life. I can foresee those who have a target would constantly bring up this case to force companies to support them. With insufficient information, people are easily driven by emotions. Hate spreads faster than positivity as it evokes stronger negative emotions like anger and disgust. Cancel culture makes use of this human weakness.
If you’ve posted controversially offensive things or those that are politically incorrect. Congratulations!
There’s no way you can escape from cancellation. You’d never know when people will bring it up to fight against you.
The only way to prevent being canceled is to stop canceling others!
Start training your critical thinking when you watch those “tea-spilling” videos.
I agree the abusive use of cancelling do more bad and good. Just like beauty gurus starting dramas with lies just to get their enemies cancelled.
But just like the above comment said, if the target is so bad that the whole society wants to cancel him but can't do it because of his wealth and power. The public can actually use their own way and power to express their opinion and warn the big guy by canceling him.
But cancel culture can still be good to the public? We can use the power of the public to remove some powerful people by boycotting them. Like what's happening in HK politics. It's very powerful.