What to do if you get cancelled online.

Keep your cool, minimize the damage, and only make amends to those you owe it to.

Don’t let yourself be a lighting rod. Photo by Greg Johnson of Unsplash.

In my time as a public figure I have been criticized, misinterpreted, accused of having positions that I do not have and of doing things that I have not done, been stalked, had threatening physical mail sent to my office, had critics of my pro-Palestinian stance report me to my University president for “antisemitism” every single day for months, been investigated professionally for bias, and been threatened with legal action for calling out ethical issues within my field.

But despite my often free-wheeling approach to digital exposure and my penchant for provocative takes, I have never been cancelled, or really had any kind of mass public censure really stick.

From massively popular YouTube celebrities to niche fetish bloggers, I’ve seen what mass criticism does to a person, the persecution narrative and all-body stress it can inspire, the many ways that a cancelled person’s panic response can lead them to make matters far worse for themselves and further infuriate those that are already angry with them.

I have seen what works and what doesn’t when responding to mass public criticism, taken notes from the handful of especially shrewd and self-controlling online figures that have managed to dodge a cancellation’s bullet once it was out of the chamber, and combined this knowledge with my understanding of group dynamics as a social psychologist. Based on all of this, I have developed a general strategy that I would recommend to anyone who wants to keep themselves feeling relatively steady when a large number of people are mad at them online.

When it comes to cancellation as social tactic, I am completely neutral, and I will be addressing it neutrally in this piece.

I do not believe, as some social-justice-oriented thinkers do, that “cancellation is not real” or that it is merely “accountability.” People close to me have been forced out of queer and artistic communities because someone with more social power demanded that the collective cut them off urgently and for vaguely articulated reasons, and threatened other vulnerable people with social ostracism if they did not comply.

Often, abuse accusations are not taken seriously, and cancellations don’t do a thing, it’s true — but sometimes, a person is accused of abuse by their abuser, or powerful people bring forward allegations of wrongdoing in order to oust a person who is already broadly disliked in their communities (because they are “creepy” or “awkward” or visibly addicted/mad/neurodivergent), and it does ruin their life.

Online, nearly every trans woman writer that I follow has been accused of being a predator, abuser, or pedophile at some point, usually by a mass of strangers that does not even know her. Some of the women put in such positions have had to relocate cities, delete their social media profiles, and put a pause on their creative careers. I have had friends run out of their cities because they made art about being raped that people online criticized as “glorifying” sexual violence. I have seen trans people and DID systems be labeled en masse as “creepy” and “deceitful” when they started dressing and speaking differently from how they used to.

I trust we all remember mass public censure that drove Isabelle Fall off of the internet and out of writing science fiction. I’m sure lots of us participated in piling on Ana Mardoll because he works at Lockheed Martin.

You maybe believe that one of these cancellations was an act of senseless mob violence, and the other was an attempt at anti-imperialist justice. At the moment, I believe that Fall’s cancellation was a completely undeserved act of hate motivated by transmisogyny, and that Mardoll’s cancellation…felt really fucking good, at the time, because of numerous misleading and manipulative things that he had done and said over the course of his career that were not the ostensible reason that he was cancelled. I can’t really say that leaking his home address did much to protect people being killed by US-manufactured tools of genocide. But the mass public censure against him did lead to him losing a number of well-paying patrons, though, which we might view as a net good.

However we might feel about these events, it is clear that the social technology of cancellation is a thing that exists, and gets used in the world, and which we must learn to contend with strategically. What we variously call cancelling/calling out/public accountability has been around since at least the days of second-wave feminist trashings, or more likely, for as long as human beings have been jockeying to other & expel one another. Cancelling is here, and it probably always will be — so long as human beings keep seeing social acceptance as a fundamental need that ensures their survival, and the removal of that acceptance remains a powerful tool.

And I do think that cancellation can be an effective way to generate the collective social power needed to take down a large institution or public figure. I have used cancellation tactics against a racist security firm in my city, and a man who domestically abused me and several others. If cancellation is violence, well, sometimes you need a weapon. And that’s why, in my next piece, I will be discussing when & how to cancel someone effectively.

In actual practice, though, most of the people I see getting successfully cancelled are trans women, women of color, and disabled or mad people who have done nothing to merit the vitriol they are receiving, and whom communities are already most poised to violently eject. And even when a person has done wrong and been called out for it, the size and scope of the consequences seems to be based on how easy it is to dispose of the person, and how many people already found them annoying/demanding/inconvenient to be around, rather than what is just, or will keep others safe.

It is the most socially vulnerable among us who are least able to cope with a cancellation — the people with attachment disorders, unhoused people, people with psychosis or paranoia, survivors of repeated trauma, people dependent upon substances, people who cannot socialize, people who can’t speak or write well, or at all, and people whom others find “scary.”

In their desperation to prove their innocence, vulnerable people do things that inspire more intense social attacks — like sharing huge amounts of unflattering personal information, profusely apologizing in a hasty way that can easily be picked apart, fighting and fawning with critics in the comments, making up transparent self-serving lies, fixating on their cancellation to the point of obsession, using substances heavily, self-harming, and various other “sins“ that mostly amount to being publicly distressed.

The mob gathers when they smell blood in the water. And a lot of people on the internet believe that the worst thing you can be is annoying or crazy.

I don’t want to see things like this happening anymore. And so I am sharing my tips for anyone who finds themselves on the receiving end of a cancellation attempt, be it large or small, and would like to minimize the fallout on their life as best they can. I also know that a lot of vulnerable people worry about being cancelled constantly, and I think having a strategy for dealing with it in your back pocket can help quell those fears.

Again, these tactics treat cancellation completely neutrally: for the purposes of this piece, I do not care whether you did something wrong or you didn’t, whether some of the public censure you’re facing is reasonable or all of it is not. My purpose here is to help you respond to what is happening in a level-headed way that does not inflame unnecessary conflict or lead to you getting attacked further, so that you can make your own decisions about what accountability you owe.

I am not here to lead you through a transformative justice process. I’m writing this because I want you to survive, and not make anything worse for yourself or anyone you might have harmed.

What to do if you get cancelled online:

1. Do not acknowledge the call-out publicly.

Responding to the call-out will only further its spread, and lend it legitimacy. Even if you make a post attempting to disprove the call-out, people will interpret your defensive reaction as a sign of guilt. When you issue a public statement about a topic as fraught as a public accusation, it signals to everyone that something very important is going on, and it makes them curious to learn more, and ensures that the accusations stick more firmly in their minds. Furthermore, posting publicly about your accusations indicates to anyone who bears you ill will that you are rattled and feeling socially threatened. It rewards the behavior.

2. Do not act out of urgency.

One of the ways that cancelled people get themselves in far worse trouble is by spiraling due to anxiety and rushing to issue a statement about what has happened, or to attempt to socially manage public impressions about what has happened.

Do not do this. Anything that you say will be picked apart and used against you by those who are hell-bent on doing so. A hasty statement will not satisfy anyone; it will excite them. The situation is truly not as urgent as it might feel. A lot of times, doing nothing and being quiet is the best way to proceed, and the dust will settle better if you do.

3. Do not issue a public apology.

If you truly feel that you have wronged someone, that conflict should be worked out in private with the people you have directly affected. You do not owe the anonymous public audience a damn thing.

Do not apologize for something you don’t honestly believe that you have done wrong. Do not apologize if you do not understand the nature of what you are being accused of. Do not apologize for how other people are interpreting your actions. Do not apologize to make yourself look better.

No matter how carefully you craft your apology, people will be able to get the stink of PR from it, and will criticize it from a variety of contradictory angles — it is too vague, it over-explains, it centers you too much, it doesn’t own up to your full part in things, it minimizes what happened, it’s just for show, it took too long, it came out too soon to be heartfelt, you didn’t mean it.

Don’t try to satisfy a public that is setting out not to be satisfied. Take time and really think about what happened, and seek the counsel of people whom you trust in PRIVATE.

4. Do not attempt to disprove the call-out unless you have crystal clear, smoking gun evidence that the person who accused you is actually victimizing you. And even then, probably don’t do it.

I have only seen a disproof of a call-out work once, and that was when a trans woman cartoonist was able to show with receipts that the person accusing her of abuse had in fact been domestically abusing her. This happened quickly enough and with such overwhelming evidence that she was able to change the social tide, moving the mob from attacking her to attacking her abuser.

But disproving the accusations was still costly to her, in energy and peace and public exposure. Having to rehash an experience of domestic violence over and over again for strangers is retraumatizing. What victims of abuse most desperately need is to feel that they hold power, and you don’t have any power when an anonymous audience of thousands gets to decide what happens to you. And so, whether you are the canceller or the cancellee, coming forward with accusations and receipts is not always worth it.

Even if the facts are on your side, acknowledging the accusations in order to argue against them will only make more people aware that those accusations exist. The people who are attacking you will be happy to tear apart your argument, and even lie about it, and if the situation is at all complex, getting into the details will muddy the waters and make people find the situation confusing and troubling rather than clear.

5. GET THE FUCK OFFLINE.

Delete your social media apps from your phone for the time being. Turn off all notifications. Turn off all DM requests. Turn off comments. Change your social media app settings so that you only can see engagement from people you already follow (I learned this tip from Philosophy Tube’s Tumblr several years ago, and I’ve been following it ever since).

If a light “freeze” on comments and messages isn’t enough for you, you can put your entire web presence on ice for a while. Set your accounts to private and lock them down. Deactivate pages so you can no longer be tagged in any hate posts. Change your social media handles if you want to be especially hard to find. A trusted friend can take charge of managing all your accounts, go through your tags and message requests and block anyone who is harassing you, clean out your follower list of anyone you don’t know, and even hold onto your passwords until you are ready to get back online again.

But do make sure to get away from the dissociation machine for long enough that you can heal, and lose a bit of the heat. Online mobs do not find it rewarding to harass a person who never even sees their message. You do not need to know every negative thing that is being said about you online. The less you expose yourself to it, the better.

6. Connect with IRL friends and loved ones.

Social media dramatically skews our sense of social priorities, such that the approval rating of complete strangers starts to seem more important than people we actually know, and trust, and who actually know us. You have to orient your attention back to what matters. Make an effort to get outside of your own head and actively engaged in the lives of other people.

Go get a meal with a buddy. Watch a dumb movie. Talk to your grandma about her plans for her garden. Surround yourself with real people you care about and focus on their lives and problems, to help put things in perspective. Let their personal victories and dramas help keep you from unlocking your phone.

7. Remember you are actually not the main character.

Not everyone is talking about you, not everybody hates you, most people have no fucking clue what has been said about you, and most people do not give a fuck about you (and that’s good).

When you’re wrapped up in a cancellation, the negative opinions of a handful of rabidly pissed online freaks seems louder & more prevalent than it actually is. But usually, the number of people who are really dedicated to making you a target is small, and everyone else is just getting swept up in the show. So don’t give them a show.

Go girl, give us nothing (to criticize). Photo of a grey rock by Isaac Li Shung Tan.

Go be quiet. Be boring. Grey rocking is a well-established tactic for surviving abuse because it works, and it can be adapted to the digital sphere. Don’t do anything interesting that can be used against you. Let the devoted haters make themselves look bad by beating a horse that has not only stopped fighting and died, but gone off to a nice farm over the rainbow bridge where it gets to play with all the other horses. (The farm, in this metaphor, is anywhere that isn’t your social media platform of choice).

There is so much you can devote your mind to other than yourself.

8. Find distracting, active, rewarding activities that bring you out of the digital space and into physical reality.

There are so many areas of life that are completely fucking untouched by what a bunch of social media power users have to say online. You will have an easier time not fixating on your cancellation if you give yourself a physical task to complete, a set of skills to master, or a new sense of purpose you can find rewarding.

Go volunteer to clean up a park, run errands for a disabled or elderly person in your neighborhood, take an exercise class, foster a dog, regrout your bathroom, knit a hat. Hop onto Meetup.com and find local groups based on shared hobbies like running, visiting restaurants, line dancing, or playing Scrabble. Check out the websites for your local park district, library, or university for events.

If you’re being threatened with a cancellation, that means you are experiencing real or perceived social rejection — and one of the best ways to fight against that is to make lots of new friends from completely different walks of life. If you need to, you can follow basically every step in my Autistic Social Butterfly’s Guide to Making Friends — finding lots of new outings will keep you busy, and remind you that the opportunities for connection are bountiful.

Even if the worst case scenario happens and a cancellation sticks, it’s really only among a certain very vocal group of miserable fucking people. There is a whole world around you that will not ever care, and you will have a life outside of this.

9. Ask yourself, am I really being cancelled or am I just being criticized?

I saved this question for near to the end, because I don’t think a person can think clearly when they are in a state of acute panic. Regardless of whether you were cancelled or not, you are likely reading this piece because you think that you might be, and when you’re in such a heightened state of social threat, taking care of yourself emotionally comes first.

But after you have followed the advice from tips #1–8 and are feeling more relaxed and regulated, I do think it is worth asking: was I cancelled, or were a few people just disagreeing with me and I viewed it as an attack?

If you have been attacked and socially ostracized frequently, it can be easy to mistake mild disagreement for a threat, because you have a supercharged rejection-prevention system that sets off the alarms early. It may also be difficult to distinguish between criticism and attack if you come from a culture where people were never allowed to have open conflicts or disagree — people from cultures where it is normal to guess what others are feeling tend to be really freaked out by the directness of people whose culture encourages them to just ask.

Generally speaking, it is people who are wealthy, white, and assimilated into Western culture who are the least skillful in taking critique, and the most likely to mistake differences in opinion as a “fight” or an “attack.” If any of this seems to apply to you, then your cancellation-false-alarm might inspire you to develop greater resilience, better communication skills, and a sense of cultural fluency.

Ask vs guess culture

People with large digital audiences are also at risk of mistaking critique for cancellation. Part of this is because the sheer number of people providing them with feedback: hearing that you’re wrong a thousand times hits differently from hearing it once, and when you can’t hold a conversation with every person that takes issue with you, it’s easy to view disagreement as coming from a faceless and menacing “other.”

But it’s also the case that the online-famous think about themselves and their brands a lot, and develop oversized egos that are easily bruised. If that’s you, you have to find a way to get over yourself, and understand that people forming opinions about your work is a natural consequence of being so widely seen. You don’t have to read everything people say about you. Some people not liking you or your work does not mean you are unsafe. It is up to you to find ways to enforce your own digital and social boundaries, and to regulate your emotions enough that you don’t turn into an alt-right “race realist” the second a disappointed person of color is in your inbox.

10. Make Being Online Fun Again

This final piece of advice is for the cancellation-survivor who has really put time into disconnecting from the endless streams of notifications and mentions, found effective ways to calm down their body and reconnect with their true friends, and is therefore ready to approach the internet with a new perspective.

Digital communication tools make up a huge, significant part of our social landscape, and the solution to its problems isn’t as simple as disconnecting entirely and forever. A lot of people want to use the internet to express themselves and meet others, and for disabled, trans, or neurodivergent people, having access to its resources is all the more important. But how do you harness the social potential of the internet when it’s already been used against you?

I would recommend focusing your attention on small, relatively private spheres of interaction, and using the internet to connect about hobbies & special interests that won’t make you infamous. You’re unlikely to get into much trouble hanging out in online support groups for people aiming to reclaim their attention spans, intentional creative communities, or Discord servers devoted to extremely niche subjects.

When I got especially weary with my own online presence, I abandoned it as fully as I could in favor of kinky Bluesky and Fetlife. Now my “doomscrolling” time is devoted to looking at beautiful pictures of latex outfits and chatting with other kinky people about the ins and outs of negotiating long-term Dominance-submission dynamics, and preparing a class for a virtual hypnosis convention that will be attended by members of my little community only. I’m pretty safe from being harassed or made into a subject of public commentary. Best of all, I think about myself very little in these realms.

Find the pockets of the internet that still really amuse and excite you, and build spaces that prioritize personalized interaction and privacy. It is still the internet, so you’ll still see your fair share of flamewars and community implosions, but you’re not likely to be hurt so badly if you no longer make yourself a public brand. Social media platforms are generally going to be more hostile to the “cancelled” than are chatting or event platforms, though sometimes switching communities is all you really need to get away from the people who have harassed you, or trigger you.

As I’ve written about recently, many of us were drawn to digital life by a desire to connect. If you were around for it, think back on the days of Myspace or Livejournal. It was very difficult to socially ostracize a person completely on platforms like those, though of course there were plenty of edgelord teenagers sending one another threats and bored adults developing the most hyperspecific of beefs. Today, finding genuine friendships on the internet is still possible. So put yourself out there. Compliment an illustrator on DeviantArt on their work. Become a moderator for a Twitch streamer that you love, or attend a virtual stand-up set.

Our connections are what we make of them — and you still have agency over your social life, even when thousands of strangers have made you feel hated. You can escape them. You will survive this. And there are so many wonderful experiences you’ll still get to have, and cherished people in your life that you have yet to meet.