Comment by SpicyLemonZest

But is that actually happening? Is this a legitimate fear for regular people or just celebrities?[1] If you lose friends for expressing your beliefs, were they actually your friends? (Or alternately - maybe they are actually good people who have finally tired of your toxic behavior, and you should reconsider your beliefs if your friends are abandoning you for them?) Are people actually being fired for expressing reasonable opinions, or is most of the firing happening when people express truly hateful and dangerous things?[2]

I honestly have no idea. I'm not on Twitter or Reddit and I religiously avoid confrontation on Facebook so maybe I'm just out of touch. My anecdotal experience suggests that apart from a few outliers the impact of cancel-culture on regular people is overblown. I don't know what statistics I'd look at to determine if that's broadly true. It seems like every time I hear someone say something like "Now I'm not even allowed to express opinions or state facts anymore!" what they actually mean is "Now when I say kind of horrible things online in a deliberate attempt to be confrontational people yell at me on Twitter!" I see a lot of what I would consider radical-right and sometimes downright hateful opinions expressed on Facebook, and the people expressing them aren't getting cancelled, fired, or even called out. Mostly they're just being congratulated by their filter bubble.

I have definitely scratched my head at some of the high-profile 'cancellations' for things that seem pretty innocuous. It seems like this mostly only happens to celebrities who have positioned themselves as liberal thinkers, though. Definitely a problem for them, and I don't envy the PC pitfalls they have to navigate. But to be fair it happens on both sides of the political spectrum - recently I've seen a number of right-leaning folks on my Facebook feed "cancelling" the NFL for the national anthem thing, or for considering renaming teams with culturally insensitive names, etc.

[1] Not that things that are only problems for celebrities aren't real problems, but I think it changes the discussion a bit.

[2] A recent example I saw of something I would consider dangerous and hateful was a screenshot of a Facebook post with a picture of a noose and a caption about teaching criminals and looters to fear the law again or something equally horrible. The profile picture was an older white woman and indicated she worked at a school. Two things stood out to me here: 1) It could easily have been faked, in part or in whole. She should have an opportunity to defend herself (the whole point of the legal system) assuming she's a real person and the profile itself wasn't entirely fabricated as outrage porn. 2) If it was real I would definitely not want my kids attending a school that would keep her on staff.