A few years ago, I found myself in an unexpected debate.
My date and I had been talking about horror films. I’d always enjoyed them; he wasn’t a fan. He liked Alien, though.
My response was immediate: “Alien’s not a horror film.”
Horror films, I said, reflect the everyday: Rosemary’s Baby (pregnancy), Hereditary (grief), Midsommar (a semester abroad). Alien, being set in space, was sci-fi.
It was typical pub chat, my conviction proportional to the one and a half glasses of wine I’d drunk. But I wanted to settle the debate, so I posted a poll to Twitter.
Within less than 24 hours, it had received 120,000 votes, overwhelmingly concluding that Alien was a horror film – and vitriolic messages were pouring in.
Online, people held me up as an example of everything wrong with journalism, scouring my work for further evidence of my idiocy, and CCing my editors to demand I be fired (I’m self-employed – but believe me, at that moment, I’d have fired myself if I could).
Scorn, rage and abuse ran rampant in my replies and DMs – much of it sexist, some violent. Entire episodes of film podcasts were dedicated to explaining why I was so wrong.
The scale and feeling of the response was shocking, unpleasant and hard to brush off. For months, I second-guessed every published sentence, trying to anticipate bad-faith interpretations.
Since then, I’ve been more circumspect about what I post – and have watched, with mounting unease, as countless more people have been thrust into the punitive spotlight.
There was the woman who tweeted about enjoying her morning routine of having coffee with her husband in their backyard. The New Yorker whose joke about impulse-buying candy at the bodega drew 40,000 responses, most of them scathing. The woman whose “motherly urge” to make chilli for her young neighbours was shouted down by strangers.
All, like me, hold the dubious honour of having been Twitter’s “main character”. Our inflammatory tweets might have been ripe for ridicule and perhaps ill-judged – but online pile-ons can have huge potential for harm.
The effect? It’s no longer just people like me, who have been burned by the spotlight, who are sensitive about sharing online; it’s everyone watching on, too.
***
When I asked friends and followers if they fear backlash on social media, I’m surprised by who the question resonates with. They’re not journalists, experts or people with large followings. They’re just individuals on the internet.
“I don’t fear ‘cancellation’, per se, but being aggressively misunderstood,” says one.
One gen Z friend tells me they worry about being called out for posting the wrong thing – or not posting enough of the right things. Several say they edit their posts and hold off on sharing jokes for fear of inadvertently causing offence.
“The ferocity of backlash these days feels much worse than it was even a few years ago,” says one friend. A 2021 YouGov survey found that nearly 60% of Britons have “at least sometimes” stopped themselves from expressing political and social views for fear of judgment or negative responses from others – a majority view among Conservative and Labour voters alike.
The same year, a study by Pew of 10,000 US adults found “a public deeply divided” about “call-out culture” online. What some saw as people experiencing the consequences of their actions, others saw as unjust punishment.
“You don’t even need to be someone who’s hyper-visible to be experiencing these things, the spillover into our offline lives is so profound,” says Africa Brooke, when I reach her by Zoom in New York.
Brooke’s book The Third Perspective: Brave Expression in the Age of Intolerance is a guide for how to navigate online hostility, informed by her experience as a Black woman engaged in the social justice sector, and insights from people who fear or have experienced backlash.
The online climate is intolerant of human complexity, Brooke argues, allowing no room for people “to stumble, fuck up, learn and grow”. Users treat each other as public figures who must be “held to account” and an online profile constitutes a “platform” you are obligated to use – despite the costs of misspeaking, revealing your ignorance or even holding a different opinion.
As a result, many are learning to stay silent. “The perception of an ‘external’ mob can create an internalised one,” she writes. It can stoke self-doubt, anxiety and fear of judgment.
While “cancel culture” is not uniformly invoked or understood, the concept of a “collective intolerance” resonates with us intuitively, Brooke says. “I like to bring it back to the everyday: what does it feel like now when conversations are being had around a dinner table? Do you feel that there are things you can or can’t say that are different to maybe even four years ago?”
Brooke’s frustrations came to a head in 2020, when – tired of having identity politics and labels thrust upon her as a female entrepreneur – she published an open letter, expressing her fears of “a world that forces me to submit to an ideology without question”.
The title, “Why I’m leaving the cult of wokeness”, was provocative, she says, aiming to ruffle feathers on the left and the right to highlight their similar close-mindedness – and it struck a chord, accumulating 20m views.
Brooke describes her own politics as left-leaning, with “values that align with feminism” – though she doesn’t call herself a feminist. “I’m from Zimbabwe, where we haven’t used that language … we don’t wear those same labels as the west.” More important than how we phrase or identify our politics and values, Brooke suggests, is how we enact them.
She emphasises that people should generally be mindful of others, question their biases and strive for inclusivity: “You need to read the room, and understand the people you’re speaking to.”
But she stresses the difference between social filtering driven by discernment and “self-censoring” out of fear, “where there’s a very real concern that the truth is going to lead to punishment”. Whether we’re second-guessing our own online presence or policing others’, “there is that culture of surveillance”.
In The Third Perspective, Brooke sets out how our innate desire to belong to “the in-group” combines with the structural design of online platforms to perpetuate pile-ons. They are dehumanising by nature, leading you to think of yourself as an “employee of Instagram”, obliged to contribute your thoughts, opinions and anger – and to manage others you see as letting the side down.
Opting out altogether is not always possible, with people increasingly obliged to maintain digital presences for their work and relationships. But what’s at stake with this febrile, suppressive climate is more than just the freedom to express ourselves online.
A 2020 study found that social media was contributing to widespread dehumanisation by stoking the perception of threat, locking people into their positions and distorting their worldview to create what researchers termed an “intractable conflict”.
Brooke is concerned that the often highly academic, note-perfect politics preached in particular within corners of the left might be pushing people towards apathy, hopelessness or more entrenched bigotry. “I don’t think we should go to the other end of saying ‘Fuck this’ – but I worry that we are pushing people in that direction.”
***
Brooke and I agree that the term “cancel culture” is counterproductive, being widely and haphazardly applied to furores with different stakes, harms and outcomes – and often weaponised disingenuously by those who seek to profit from it.
Brooke prefers to speak of “collective self-sabotage”, whereby people might speak out or stay silent in a way that works against our best interests and progress as a society.
Many people feel like they’re walking a tightrope: wanting to express themselves online or feeling social pressure to post, at the same time fearing to put a foot wrong. It’s no wonder they might stick to sharing pictures of cats – though I was once lovingly told by a friend that I was posting mine too much.
“It’s a very anti-intimacy culture we’re creating,” says Brooke – not in the context of romantic love (though dating apps have made us more brittle and prescriptive there, too), but in the sense of being open to others’ experience, self-expression and humanity. After nearly 10 years of this exhausting cycle, there’s increasing desire for “common sense”, Brooke says. “People are fed up.”
She advocates gaining an awareness of how social media pits us against each other and reflecting on how we want to participate in the public sphere. Online activism plays an important part in raising awareness of crises and causes, but it’s not the only way to make ourselves heard. “We have an assumption that to undo self-censorship and speak bravely, we need to be brave online, but that’s not the case,” says Brooke.
We might decide to post less, but protest, write to politicians and donate more – and try to engage others in person.
The best way to build confidence expressing yourself is “moment to moment”, Brooke says, increasing your self-awareness and tolerance for debate. “Social media should not be the training ground for any of this … It has to be a byproduct of the work you’re doing offline.”
Brooke sees the change as starting in our interpersonal relationships – by seeking to understand our individual blindspots and biases, learning to relate to others without negating ourselves, and speaking our mind thoughtfully, with care and conviction.
And in the event that we are called out for being ignorant, insensitive or offensive, we can try to resist the impulse to either defiantly double down or instantly apologise, and instead parse the feedback for what we can learn and how we might do better in future.
Some comfort with difficult conversations is necessary if we’re ever to achieve transformative change, Brooke points out: “A lot of this is about being willing to take emotional and conversational risks – because that’s what creates intimacy and understanding.”
Now, when posting on social media, Brooke ascertains her motive or goal: “Is it just to get this thought out there, or to further a conversation, to change someone’s mind, or to reach more people?” That clarity makes it easier to weather disagreement, she says – or to direct your energy elsewhere.
Since Alien-gate, I’ve shared less on social media – but I’ve tried to be more thoughtful.
I’ve often wondered, of the people who pilloried me for my provocative opinion, how they would have reacted had they been my date. They might not have wanted to see me again – but I like to think that they might not have called me stupid and complained to my bosses.
Years later, my definition of horror is less rigid. I hope they have changed, too.
• This article was amended on 22 May 2024 because an earlier version misnamed the title of Africa Brooke’s open letter as: “Why I’m leaving the cult of anti-wokeness”. The title ends with wokeness, not anti-wokeness.
