How to cancel someone online.

How the internet functions — and sometimes fails — as a tool of public accountability.

The cover to Robert Greene’s book The 48 Laws of Power, but “Power” has been replaced with “Cancelling”

In my last piece, I discussed how a person who finds themselves getting cancelled on the internet might want to respond. My focus was on helping the cancelled person to reduce the amount of distressing feedback they encounter, detach their sense of self from their digital self-image, and take some time away from the internet, in the embrace of trusted friends, so that they could decide at their own pace whether they really owed anyone a response. Informed by the experiences so many dear friends who have been cancelled without cause, I wrote that piece as a survival guide.

What to do if you get cancelled online.

But this piece is for the people who are seeking accountability for some act of wrongdoing; the sexual assault survivors, domestic violence victims, exploited workers, and dismayed fans who want to use the internet to attain justice for some great harm, but aren’t quite sure how. Dear reader, I am decidedly not a Clementine Morrigan; I don’t think that criticism is violence, I don’t think that a content creator’s financial success and their private conduct should be treated as entirely separate, and I believe that public censure via the internet can and sometimes should be used to bring powerful forces to heel.

I’m also an outspoken anarchist and abolitionist who puts very little trust into large institutions like schooling systems or the government. My life and work has taught me that when a powerful force or figure takes advantage of their position, plunders marginalized communities, or turns an oblivious eye to harm, you can’t make them change by asking nicely. Nor can you, as an individual who has been harmed, right their wrongs simply by coming forward and telling your story.

No, if you want to fell the Goliath that’s been poisoning your city’s water supply or paying a seven-figure salary to the executive who assaulted you, you need do to more than throw a single rock. What you need is a coordinated mass demand for change, and hundreds of people to bring their outrage together in a collective show of strength.

An online cancellation can sometimes do a bit of that. When harnessed correctly, a digital cancellation/call-out/demand for public accountability can do things like strip $7 billion from McDonald’s stock valuation as recompense for its investment in Israel, make a YouTuber like Shane Dawson lose 60% of his subscribers and monetization on his videos after being outed for kissing children at his meet & greets, or get a repeated sexual harasser of his colleagues like former Polygon staffer Nick Robinson suspended from his job.

In my last piece, I spoke about how frequently cancellation is used as a tactic of social exclusion against mad, disabled, Black, and transfeminine people, and how much psychological damage it can wreak, with little benefit to any actual survivors. But in the right circumstances and with the appropriate target, cancellation can work. It’s just important to understand the tool’s proper use cases and the risks that come with wielding it.

Here I will put my own bona fides as a veteran of the cancellation wars on the table:

In 2017, when Nick Robinson was outed as a serial sexual harasser of women, I wrote the single most widely-shared and quoted criticism of his public “apology,” which played its own modest role in keeping public opinion turned against him. In 2019, when Chicago’s LGBTQ community center the Center on Halsted was working with a security firm owned by a racist cop who had been suspended from the Chicago Police Department for beating and yelling slurs at an innocent Black man, I used my writing to shine a spotlight on it, which in turn inspired journalists and local advocacy organizations to take action, and the security firm’s contract was suspended.

Chicago’s Queer Community Center is “Protected” by a Racist Cop
Security Chief Thomas Walsh is a bigoted, hate-crime-committing threat to the LGBTQ community of Chicago.devonprice.medium.com

I have called out The Chicago Tribune for refusing to use nonbinary people’s pronouns, the South by Southwest conference for working with the US military, and my own colleagues for using questionable research protocols that led to the publication of specious study results. I have called out Medium for shadow-banning work from polyamorous and queer writers.

I’ve also written frequently about my domestic abusers and rapists, including former classmates of mine and a beloved Chicago stand-up comedian who died in 2014. In public, I have never named these men, but I’ve shared enough information for them to be recognizable to anyone in the know. I have no doubt that my public messaging has impacted the lives of these men (well, the ones who are still alive). And speaking out made it possible for me to connect with some of their other survivors, which I’m eternally grateful for.

I do not think that it’s usually possible for a person to be held accountable in a meaningful way by a group of internet strangers they have never met and have no relationship with. I also think that mass public censure online can do a lot of unnecessary damage, particularly to victims, whose lives and moral character get interrogated when they become the symbol of a cancellation attempt. A hastily conceived call-out can do a lot more harm than good. But like any other tactic, cancellation has an underlying logic behind it, and its effectiveness is determined by how well it harnesses the emotions and social power of its audience.

This cancellation shit is a game that can be won. You just have to play it correctly. So here are my tips for launching an effective public accountability process without having it die on the vine or blow up in your face:

1. Know your target.

To launch an effective cancellation, you first need to make sure that your target is suitable for a public accountability demand in the first place.

For the most part, online cancellations are useful at directing a lot of negative attention toward someone who is already active on social media, or for shifting public opinion against someone when they’re already the subject of public discussion (such as when they are on trial for domestic violence). It is pretty difficult for a call-out to affect an anonymous figure, or a person who doesn’t have a strong web presence. So if your target is a mega-famous celebrity who doesn’t post, or a completely obscure figure with no social media presence or cultural relevance, it’s less likely that your cancellation will work.

I think it’s important on both an ethical and tactical level to consider just how powerful your target is. If the person you are trying to publicly cancel is a broke trans person known only to your local scene, there is a risk of your campaign being seen as excessive — and the consequences of ousting them from social good-standing being far larger than you could have imagined. It’s usually best to settle matters interpersonally where you can, and to converse with survivors and community organizers privately before launching a public statement that can’t ever be undone.

It is in my personal ethics to reserve the tactic of cancellation for powerful institutions and publicly known, wealthy, or influential people. These are the entities that have the greatest capacity to hurt others, and who stand upon the tallest, most visible pedestals, which makes them the easiest to topple. Still, it is important to identify just how much social influence and support your target has, and to prepare for any backlash they and their fans might launch against you.

This is not a fight to go into half-cocked. Aim straight, keep the focus on your one specific target, and be ready to defend yourself when they return fire.

2. Identify a realistic, specific goal.

Far too many aggrieved parties launch a cancellation without any sense of what they want to have come out of it. They just know that they’ve been wronged, and they’re hurting, and they want the world to know. But the desire to express one’s pain is not a sensible reason for launching a cancellation. If all that you’ve thought about is the emotional or moral righteousness of your cause, you’re going to get pummeled when it comes to the practical side of things.

Do you want to be right, or to win?

I’ll illustrate my point with an example. Some time ago, a friend asked for my advice in dealing with a former roommate who had abused them and stolen hundreds of dollars’ worth of their stuff. The former roommate was, themselves, a disabled trans person who in a financially vulnerable position; calling them out publicly would have been a decidedly bad look for my friend, and wouldn’t have righted the wrongs or gotten my friend’s money back.

The real problem at hand was that my friend was hurting, and needed community support for the mistreatment they’d faced and the financial losses they had incurred. And so, rather than writing a public call-out of their former roommate, I encouraged my friend to make a post explaining that they’d recently been mistreated and stolen from and needed their community to chip in with donations and words of support. This allowed my friend to get care that would really help him, without exploding a private matter into an online controversy.

When you want to cancel a person or institution online, you have to be clear with yourself about what your desired outcome is, and whether or not that outcome is realistic.

Here are some example outcomes that you could aim for — note that they are most attainable when the target is a public figure:

I want to warn potential partners/colleagues/community members that the target is dangerous.

I want the target to lose their job.

I want the target to lose social media followers.

I want the target’s events to get less popular.

I want the target to lose sponsorships or monetization online.

I want to shift public opinion about the target.

I want a local business or organization to end their contract with the target.

I want the target banned from an event that I/their victims frequent.

Your goal should be specific, observable, and something that you & your allies actually have the power to influence. Things like “I want the target to feel bad” or “I want the target to take accountability” are generally not useful goals of a cancellation. You cannot control what another person thinks or feels, and launching a mass call-out campaign is just about the worst way to make somebody be receptive to meaningful change.

When a person gets attacked online, they get defensive and focus on image management. Hell, I just advised them to do so in my last piece! So make sure your tool matches the task at hand. Private conversations are for interpersonal conflict; cancellation is for knocking down the powerful.

3. Understand the risks of speaking out.

Whenever you take aim at an influential person or organization, you can be assured they will launch a counter-offensive. They will demand proof, call into question your receipts, dig up unflattering information about the organizers, slander the names of accusers, harass victims, and terrorize your supporters. They may also retaliate against anyone they currently hold power over.

Are you prepared for the backlash? Are the rewards worth the risks? These questions are especially vital to answer if survivors of sexual violence or domestic abuse are coming forward with their stories. We all know by now just how often survivors are accused of being sluts, narcissists, borderlines, and abusers when they share their stories. They may be sued for defamation or libel, too. They may find it retraumatizing to see the details of their abuse debated on social media over and over and over again.

When I have written about my own assaults, I have found it both cathartic and triggering. Many years out from having done so, I don’t regret sharing my story, but the onslaught of questions and doubts that I received really changed me. I think the most important task for the survivor is to protect themselves and focus on their healing; sometimes that means closing the door on a justice that might never come.

So before you launch a public accountability process of any kind, make sure that it’s in the interest of every survivor to face the public. I have seen organizers tell stories of abuse that were not theirs to tell, watched clearly traumatized victims expose themselves to criticism and mass rubber-necking when they weren’t ready.

You need to have a plan in place for supporting survivors when the backlash inevitably happens. Things to consider:

• Who is going to manage the victims’ social media accounts?

• How will you keep victims safe from harassment in their community or at public events?

• How will you pay for victims’ therapy or anti-doxxing services?

• How will victims feel if after all this revisiting trauma and risking exposure, nothing actually happens?

Figure this out before you breathe a word of the campaign to the public.

4. Build collective social power.

Before you launch your cancellation, you will have to nurture your team of allies. An anonymous, low-follower social media account or unsourced website is just not going to cut it. At best it will do nothing and at worst, it might make you look like a stalker or crank. People are skeptical of cancellation campaigns at this point, and so if you’d like other people to take action and help you accomplish your goals, you will have to build sufficient goodwill.

Successful cancellation campaigns tend to come from people that have a sizeable following, numerous connections to other organizations and trusted figures, and whose claims are backed up by multiple other survivors or witnesses. If only one Twitter account had spoken out about Nick Robinson being a creep in DMs, his cancellation would have probably amounted to nothing. It was only because numerous other users shared their experience (including several trusted voices in the games industry) that he & his employer felt forced to respond.

If you want to cancel a person or institution effectively, then, you’ve got to plan ahead. Some questions to ask:

Are there multiple victims?

Are all of the victims willing to speak out?

Is every victim “on message,” or do different people have different stories and agendas?

Are there organizations or community leaders who are willing to support you?

Do you have a team that can help you with messaging, social media promotion, organizing events, and responding to harassment?

It may take months of careful meeting and planning to arrive at a plan for the cancellation that works for everyone affected, and it’s well worth the investment, because intentionality will help protect everyone. If every person has a different story about the target and a different desired outcome (or if you’re not certain that anyone in a position of power will take your side as an accuser), you’re at the risk of creating a confusing, messy dust-up that only blows back onto you.

I am reminded of the Babe.net article on Aziz Ansari’s acts of sexual coercion. The story was poorly reported, and because of this, Ansari’s victim was criticized and his character was defended by everyone from manosphere reactionaries to middle-of-the-road comedy colleagues. Who knows how the story would have played out if the journalist had tried finding other women who had dated Ansari, or if a clearer picture of the night’s events had been presented. With greater care put into the reporting, there might not have been an article at all.

5. Enlist as much practical help as you can.

Survivors & wronged parties should not be leading the cancellation alone. In order for this work to be both sustainable and effective, you will need other people who have not been personally hurt by the target carrying the campaign forward and handling the minutiae that comes up day-by-day.

Ask your trusted allies to handle the drudgery of things like:

• Checking DM requests

• Moderating comments

• Blocking harassment

• Formatting infographics

• Fielding media requests

• Sending campaign updates

• Scheduling meetings

• Keeping records

• Organizing public events (such as protests)

Haven’t thought about these housekeeping aspects of running a cancellation? You should! A successful cancellation campaign is a whole lot more than just making a post. You have to create an ongoing conversation about your target and sustain it, keep finding a fresh audience who hasn’t yet heard of the accusations and directing their energy toward your desired outcome. It’s like any other political action — it needs banner-men, medics, secretaries, artists, and administrators on hand.

When I wrote about The Center on Halsted hiring the racist firm Walsh Security, I was quickly joined in my efforts by Lighthouse Foundation a Black LGBTQ Church in Chicago with a sizeable political action wing and a large stable of dedicated allies. It was Lighthouse Foundation, not me, that organized a protest outside the Center on Halsted and started inviting journalists to its organizing meetings. It was Lighthouse Foundation that met with Center on Halsted leadership after generating public outcry against them, and persuaded them to terminate Walsh Security’s contract.

I helped start the public dialogue about this issue, and spread an infographic asking concerned Chicagoans to call the Center and lodge complaints — but if the efforts had ended with me, nothing much would have happened. It takes a crowd of concerned individuals lending their voice to the cause and the political know-how of multiple devoted activists in order to get demands met. Do not post that call-out until you have them.

6. Write a clear, succinct, well-supported call-out with receipts.

Have you ensured your target is suitable for cancellation, articulated a feasible goal for your cancellation campaign, and built your dream team of allies, survivors, and support staff? Congratulations, you are ready for your call-out to launch! Just make sure you’re presenting information properly first.

An effective call-out is like any other form of effective public messaging: it is easy-to-follow, persuasive, accessible, and does not waste words. It should have a clear audience in mind, and provide that audience with all the context they need to understand why the call-out is being made, and what is being asked of them.

Universal design principles absolutely come into play here. Your call-out should be written in legible, large text in a dark, dyslexia-friendly font, set against a light-colored background. All information should be provided in text that is accessible to a screen-reader, and you should use captioning and alt text to make all videos and images interpretable. Don’t let social media be the only place where your call-out lives; a backup document file or website can serve as a mirror in case posts get banned for “harassment.”

Provide a clear background on the target that indicates who they are and what makes them so powerful. If someone doesn’t frequent your Contra class/church/local bar scene/theater community, why should they care about what this person has done? Consider mentioning awards they have won, positions or titles that they hold, or statistics on their reach to convey how powerful they are.

Name the target’s actions accurately and help the reader understand the scope of the harm they have done. Be precise. Vague accusations of “doing harm,” “being unsafe,” “being racist/transphobic/etc,” “being a predator,” and the like are not helpful, and have been used in such varied ways at this point that people have come to mistrust them. Write in the active voice: tell them who did what.

Want to Highlight the Cause of an Injustice? Write in the Active Voice.
“Historically underrepresented” —  by whom?devonprice.medium.com

Keep your call-out brief and focused on the most impactful offenses. Tumblr call-out posts have become infamous for listing “harms” such as being a pro-shipper right alongside accusations of grave-robbing, running an unlicensed psychology practice, and child enslavement (yes, really; Google sixpenceeeheals). You don’t want to bog down your audience with needlessly insular beef. Focusing on petty grievances makes your cause look bad. Fewer accusations = less to nitpick.

Provide a link to your sources, making sure to have cleared everything with the victims and tapped seasoned activists for support. This document file on the abuses of the Party for Socialism and Liberation is a great template I think. It is thorough, backed up with a panoply of journalistic sources and personal accounts, and keeps a regular update log. It’s easy-to-follow for someone new to the subject, but also comprehensive.

In your call-out, make sure to give your audience a reason to care. That your target is a racist or rapist is not actually a sufficient reason for them to take action; the world is filled with such types, and nobody has the time to take everyone down. Is your target the head of a company? Do they make decisions about the hiring and firing of people in an important field? Does their position give them access to new victims? When my friend Chris Piatt wrote about the sexually & physically abusive Darrell Cox of Profiles Theater, he made sure to convey what an artistic powerhouse the theater was in the Chicago scene, and just how many women had been continually terrorized by the man.

This reporting inspired concerned Chicagoans to literally paper over the theater with copies of Piatt’s article. The stakes were clear. The consequences were real.

A photo of Profiles Theater covered in copies of The Chicago Reader issue discussing Darrell Cox’s abuse.

Once you’ve frothed your audience into a fury about the actions of your target, it’s time to give them a place to direct all that rage. Make a call to action. And make it a good one:

7. Make a call to action, and make it easy to follow.

You’ve already articulated the goal for your cancellation campaign, haven’t you? (If not, scroll back up to Step #2). Now is the time to get your audience to carry it out! Give everyone viewing your call-out post a specific course of action to follow, and remove all the barriers to taking action that you possibly can.

Do you want your audience to flood your target’s voicemail with phone calls? Provide them with a phone number and a script! Want to demonstrate that thousands of people want to see your target fired? Make a petition and drop the link. Need a more impactful, physical showing of support? Name a time and place (like the quad of the university you are criticizing, or the home of the politician you are targeting) and get the masses to show up.

Your call to action should be simple, accessible, and aligned with your goals. You should also facilitate your audience absolutely bombarding the target (or their institution) with notifications. Every post should be publicly shareable, and you should encourage your supporters to tag the target & their institution freely.

Keep in mind that there should be an appropriate ratio between the number of posts you make and the number of requests you make of your audience, as well. In the social media marketing world, the rule of thumb is that only 20–25% of your content should ask something of the viewer, at most. Even in the world of cancellation campaigning, you do have to give your followers a reason to stick around. Announce minor victories frequently and share meaningful quotes from survivors or supporting organizations, so that people supporting you feel rewarded for being part of something larger than themselves.

It might sound crass, but you should ask yourself what the audience has to get out of supporting your cancellation campaign. Will they get to see a net benefit to the world? Feel like they have done something meaningful? Support an artistic world or marginalized community they care about? People want to feel emotionally uplifted and socially accepted, so find a way for your call-out campaign to provide those sensations. People will unfollow you if everything you post is negativity and secondary trauma.

8. Avoid profiting from the cancellation.

Occasionally, the creator of a public call-out will make themselves the “main character” of the campaign and corrupt the movement. This often happens when accusations hit an artistic community (such as a theater company, party scene, drag bar, or writing group) and someone in that world stands to gain from all the resulting attention and clout.

It happens for reasons both innocent and craven. A social worker leads a processing session on Instagram Live and starts getting treated like a guru. A performer airs out the dirty laundry on a rival that they have always hated. A writer learns that their words have the power to shape reality and it goes to their head. Once a lot of outrage has been fomented and there’s money and followers flowing around, people start talking a lot of nonsense about how to get their own little piece of them. And soon, if you’re not careful, your movement has a figurehead that is so much easier to take down than a collective is.

You want to make your cancellation campaign as unimpeachable as possible, which means you shouldn’t use it to promote any personal projects or grow individual followings. Even if the victim is also an aspiring actress. Even if the target is a famous clothing designer who totally does not deserve the number of sales that he’s made.

Clout is not reparations, and profit is not accountability. Keep your collective eyes on the prize. Your movement is only as strong as you are all together.

The one light exception to this, of course, is getting survivors the resources they need to be safe, secure, and to heal. If the company you’re cancelling fired its employees in a clear act of union-busting, you should raise funds to pay their bills. If a victim needs to relocate, get the public to help cover their move. And there is nothing wrong with encouraging people to give survivors a strong showing of support. Ideally, you will have all figured this into your list of goals and risk mitigation strategies already, but you can continue to adapt as the situation does.

Just never forget that this campaign was about justice, not sniping at a person you hate, grasping their success for yourself, or improving the public image of your own organization.

In sum, cancellation is an inescapable technology of the digital age; it cannot distinguish between metal and flesh, between just cause and unjust, nor does it care. It is for us to decide how to harness its potential and direct its might. Rather than fighting over whether it does exist or focusing only on the rightness or wrongness of our causes, we can face social problems strategically, and look inward to decide when and how tactics like these ought to be used.

Other entries in my how-to social media series: