Everyday Life, Media, and Viral Cultures
Section editor: Dr. Marzieyh Yousefi
In the Loge
Mary Cassatt, 1878
Cancel Culture: A Contemporary Social Movement
Dr. Marziyeh Yousefi, Assistant Professor
ACSS Department, UCW
In the age of social media, collective action no longer requires physical gatherings or organized institutions. “Cancel culture” has emerged as a new form of digital movement, where people primarily on social networks express their disapproval of the actions of individuals, brands, or companies for their perceived harmful or controversial actions or statements. This public defamation places social pressure on these individuals to apologize publicly, take accountability, and correct their behavior.
According to Roldan, Ong, and Tomas (2024), there are two main stances on cancel culture: one views it as a positive step towards social and political justice, while the other stance regards cancel culture as a form of virtue signaling. The most prominent example of the first stance is the #MeToo movement, which successfully canceled Harvey Weinstein, a former film producer and co-founder of the entertainment company Miramax. He evaded allegations of sexual abuse and sexual assault for at least 30 years until the scale of the movement grew large enough to prompt more victims to come forward (Roldan, et al., 2024).
Over the last decade, social media has become a place for modern public judgment. Although cancel culture allows marginalized people to seek accountability and gives a voice to the less powerful, it can also lead many celebrities or companies to lose their reputation, business opportunities, collaborations, and relationships.
In a recent case, Huda Kattan, the owner of the Huda Beauty brand, shared a video on Instagram in January 2026 showing a pro-government protester burning images of Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the former Shah of Iran. This was interpreted by critics —especially within Iranian communities — as supporting the Iranian regime and ignoring the violence against the protesters. Thousands of users began sharing videos of themselves discarding Huda Beauty products and urging others to boycott the line, creating a branded hashtag movement online.
As a result, Kattan reportedly lost over 40,000 followers in a single day as part of the fallout, and some influencers, including her own sister, publicly unfollowed her accounts (OpenAI, 2026). Beyond follower attrition, there were tangible commercial effects: sales of several key products in major retail stores such as Sephora reportedly dipped in the aftermath of the backlash, with some items seeing declines of up to 45 % (OpenAI, 2026). Ultimately, Huda Kattan apologized for her stance and retracted her comments from social media.
Despite the constructive possibilities, cancel culture can easily turn into a slippery slope form of cyberbullying, spurring bullying, injustice, threats, and even violence. It can quickly escalate from social-media disapproval into measurable reputational damage and real economic consequences. The wave of criticism can be so strong that it can destroy a career, image, or business built up over several years in a matter of days or even hours. In most cases, even if the “accused” defends themselves in an online apology, it is often too late, and the avalanche of hate is already unleashed. The internet community may forgive the accused, but it won't forget.
Moreover, questions have emerged regarding the fairness and long-term social impacts of these movements. In modern courtrooms on social media, the public sentences and makes verdicts in just seconds, but to what extent are these condemnations effective? Are we focusing on the root systemic problems or just on the individuals and 'abolishing' them?
As former president Barack Obama states, “Like, if I tweet or hashtag about how you didn’t do something right or used the wrong verb, then I can sit back and feel pretty good about myself, ’cause, ‘Man, you see how woke I was. I called you out.’. . . That’s not activism. That’s not bringing about change. If all you’re doing is casting stones, you’re probably not going to get that far. That’s easy to do.”
In summary, while cancel culture is a valuable tool for exposing toxic or illegal behavior and has contributed to significant movements such as #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter, we must also not get blinded by the wave of hate and consider its long-term impacts on individuals, society, and freedom of speech on social media.
References
Molnárová, P. (2025). #CANCELCULTURE: nightmare of this digital age or road to public responsibility? https://www.essencemediacom.com/news/cancelculture
OpenAI. (2026). ChatGPT (GPT-5) [Large language model]. https://chat.openai.com/
Purwar, K. (2026). Explained: Why Iranians Started The 'Boycott Huda Beauty' Trend On Social Media. NDTV.com https://www.ndtv.com/lifestyle/explained-why-iranians-started-the-boycott-huda-beauty-trend-on-social-media-10923959
Roldan, C. J. L., Ong, A. K. S., & Tomas, D. Q. (2024). Cancel culture in a developing country: A belief in a just world behavioral analysis among Generation Z. Acta Psychologica, 248, 104378. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2024.104378
Viral culture: A tool of Surveillance capitalism
Dr. Yukti Seth, Assistant Professor
ACSS Department, UCW
Spontaneous and democratic form of expression on social media is viral culture. The freedom of expression like trending dancing videos, memes or social media # movements get viral organically and create or shape this digital culture. This viral nature of media leads to create algorithm which tends to attract specific consumers of media. In this era of surveillance capitalism viral culture plays an important role to analyze, predict and monetize content on terms of behavioural data. Algorithm boost the recommendations of data preferences of everyone of what they like based on what is trending.
The data reachability decides what is more trending and that is how future behaviour is predicted. culture is more dependent on what is more visible and how it is performed. The culture has shaped minds with FOMO which means Fear of missing out information, people also want to make sure they are being more relevant and validated by society. It has become about likes, views and shares.
The pioneer researcher of the term surveillance capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff has clearly stated that the data mined by companies like google or Facebook from online behaviour are further sold to new companies which are willing or planning to start new business with the same target audience. YouTube, Instagram and other such applications work on same model of economic monetization.
The viral culture is stated as a culture where people have democratic right to express themselves, but it is leading to antidemocratic force, digital inequality. Few audiences in this scenario are considered as subject with data while other category audience as subject of manipulation which leads to loss of agency.
In conclusion viral culture is not only about likes, shares or creating content for entertainment or education. It is also for monetizing it through data. By learning about it, raises a question should there be specific laws for online media platforms so these companies can’t intrude privacy of common man and can we have useful access to such media platforms without ourselves being product to these big media companies.