I don't know if you're aware, but cancel culture is a huge
topic on the internet right now and it seems like everybody
left and right from politicians, public figures, YouTubers,
The Bachelorette.
Everybody has been getting cancelled at varying degrees and
I have to say as a third party observer,
it's been really entertaining and educational to watch it
all unfold.
It seems that of all the voices speaking out about cancel
culture, the loudest ones seem to fall into one of two
camps.
Number one.
This camp seems to paint cancel culture as a frivolous phenomenon,
whereby a keyboard warriors scour the internet for one wrong
tweet or one wrong video to then ruin the life of its originator
who is often painted as an otherwise innocent person who
just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time
and having said the wrong thing. Camp number two are the keyboard
warriors who camp number one has staked its claim against.
Camp number two's manifesto is a lot simpler than camp number
one. It is to shine a light on abuses
of the power and let public opinion serve its karmic duty
to right what is wrong in the world. To this camp, cancellation
isn't frivolous.
It is citizens of the internet exercising their right to
speak out and derive strength in numbers to hold problematic
people and problematic institutions to account.
Is it obvious to you yet
where my bias lies? What if I told you that
I've actually been in both camps and I see validity on both
sides, and I've even been canceled myself. And well,
this experience of being cancelled
I wouldn't wish it upon anyone because at the time it felt
terrible. I'm actually very grateful for the learning opportunity
that came about from it, especially at the time that it did.
So this happened at my first job out of university and let's
just say it was a real lesson in the school of hard knocks.
Today's video, instead of making any points one way or another.
I simply just want to share with you an experience that happened
in my early career about the time that I got canceled so
that we can, hopefully you can get a sense of the lessons
that I was able to extract from the experience because those
lessons have stuck with me for a long long time and I'm so
grateful that I'm able to carry them with me.
Oh, I guess I'm gonna have to tell you what actually happened
now. Here's the disclaimer.
I'm still to this very day
am ashamed of what I did and I'm not proud of the mistake
that I made and the only reason why I'm able to make this
video is because the amount of gratitude I have for the learning
lessons that came from the experience out way the shame of the
experience itself.
So bear with me. The year was 2014 and I was working my first
job out of college like I said before. I was working at a
social as a social media manager at a tech startup. At the
time, everybody was on Twitter and it was really easy to
grow organically.
I started using a technique where I would incessantly click
the follow button until I wake up the next day to hundreds
of Twitter users having followed me back. Rinse and repeat
until boom.
I woke up with twenty four thousand Twitter followers seemingly
overnight and because this is 2014 people back then actually
read the stuff
that you posted on Twitter and they engaged with it.
Essentially,
I had hacked my way into having an audience which is pretty
sweet at the time. In October 2014, a national tragedy occurred
in my nation's capital of Ottawa, Canada.
What had happened was that a gunman had arrived on Parliament
Hill and started opening fire.
He killed one person and injured three more before he himself
was shot and killed by the RCMP.
The person killed by the gunman was Corporal Nathan Cirillo
who was a Canadian soldier who had been on sentry duty at
the time the incident occurred. That's my brief account of
what happened.
Now what had happened to me of the time of this shooting
was that I was sitting at my desk at work doing my usual
marketing things until my boss walked in and he gave me a
rundown of what was going on.
He then asked me to write and publish a tweet promoting the
startup's product because he felt it would be helpful in crisis
situations like the one that was going on that day.
I resisted and I said I didn't think it was a good idea.
Then he proceeded to give me a list of all the reasons why
it would be a good idea.
And also he was my boss.
Nonetheless.
I ended up caving and I wrote the tweet and I went for
lunch. This is actually still, like makes me nervous just talking
about it because when I came back from lunch that day it
was to a barrage of responses. People responded to my tweet
and they were calling me out.
They were saying shame on you.
You're a disgusting human being, how dare you use a national
crisis for personal gain. You know, some people had retweeted
my tweet
and said don't support the startup that she works for
and I had lost hundreds of followers that day.
So what I did was I immediately took my tweet down and I
wrote another tweet and I apologized the best that I could
and then I went into my boss's office and told him what happened.
His response to me was "Oops I guess we shouldn't have done
that". This incident shook me up so much.
I don't think I, I think I ended up going home early that day
because I truly had not experienced something of that nature
before. So I've had the benefit of over five years now to
process what exactly went down.
These are the lessons that I learned and these are really
profound lessons that shape the way that I saw social media
and my role as a citizen of the world.
Lesson number one is that you are responsible for everything
you put out on the internet intentions do not absolve you
from responsibility.
Now, you could divert the blame onto a clueless boss.
You could say it wasn't your intention to cause pain at all.
But if you did cause pain, if your words resulted in other
people being hurt, that's all on you and you should apologize
for it, and rectify that pain if doing so is something you
care about.
Lesson number two. To be a responsible social media citizen you have to
be listening at least as much as you are speaking. One of
the most beautiful things about social media to me is that
it really gives you a sense of where the pulse of public
discourse is at. social media is a great educational tool
for anyone who wants to learn about various different viewpoints
or lived experiences and it's great for expanding your mind.
There seems to be a lot of fear these days. Fear about saying
the wrong thing in this climate of sensitivity or political
correctness as some would call it. But in my experience, if
you are listening to people of other walks of life of various
different perspectives, if you are listening more than you
are speaking that you don't have to be afraid about saying
the wrong thing because you would just have a sense of where,
of how people are feeling. Lesson number three, if you've been
canceled there is a way back, with an asterisk.
Obviously, you know, there are cases which you know, the
person getting cancelled has committed such heinous, heinous
acts and heinous crimes that we just don't want to hear
from them anymore and they deserve to be in jail or what
have you. But if we're talking about incidences where it's
just simply a matter of somebody not exercising critical
thinking, not exercising good judgment and they make a mistake
and they demonstrate that they want to learn from the mistake
and own up to it.
I feel like we should all be giving those people a chance
and here's the thing.
I think that's, that is our climate today.
I think that for the most part people are willing to listen
to apologies. Clearly, because apologies are a huge trending
thing on YouTube right now,
apparently. I find it so interesting that if you look at
some of the people who've been cancelled in the last two
years, there are, you can name a bunch of people who have made
comebacks after being canceled after putting in the work.
James Charles, Hannah Brown, Jimmy Fallon, even my own prime
minister, Justin Trudeau.
Do you remember the black face controversy? Anyway, so apparently
we all loved him this year because okay fine.
I'm being a little unfair.
He's pretty awesome this year.
This is where cancel culture can be productive. As if it
calls people out for their wrongdoing but then leaves room
for the rectification of that same wrongdoing.
I would like to believe that we live in a world in which
most people are willing to forgive if they see that the work
has been done to earn that forgiveness and I I'd like to
believe that we live in a world in which people who make
mistakes do have the opportunity to learn and come back from
their wrongdoings.
But here's the thing, if you make a mistake, the onus to learn
from it and to come back from it is on you. Until you do the
work, it should never be assumed that you deserve forgiveness
because forgiveness is to be earned.
I think that's a principle that we can all live by. So in
the beginning of this video, I sort of depicted the voices
that are the most vocal about cancel culture and I sort of
put them in one of two camps and I was being cheeky.
But if you, and I say this as somebody who has really tried
to figure out what my views on cancel culture are and it's
evolved a lot over the years and even over the last few months.
And I'm not saying I have the answers.
But what I am saying is that when I look at both camps, I
see that they both are making a statement about where society
should be headed towards and when I look at that vision that
they paint, I see a lot of similarities in their respective
visions. They both call for a society that runs on empathy
in which we're listening to one another and we're being understanding
of other people's point of views and perspectives and that we're
not afraid to engage and reach across the aisle and learn.
I don't think many people can say that that is a particularly
contentious vision to be working towards and I think that
people just have a different, they just have a disagreement
about how we get there.
I just keep, okay this video is so hard for me to film because I
just kept going on and on and on and on but if you're here
now, thank you for listening to my story time and for being
with me in this and I will see you in my next video. If you
haven't subscribed, please do so or just whatever if you don't
want to, that's fine, too.
That's the message today is nuance.