Companies like Facebook and Twitter, which have positioned themselves as the new public square, should absolutely be questioned on their role in cancel culture
Last week, Republican Rep. Jim Jordan asked a question at a Congressional hearing that seemed to come out of nowhere. Tweets: @carnage4life , @jimwaterson , @bradesposito , @mrjkilcoyne , @verba_et_vertus , @landofsticks , @awilsonsmith , @ajreinhart , @ejessicajohnson , @imtheq , @ckozalbrennan , @elamin88 , @jayrosen_nyu , @stephemcneal , @cornies , @ashleyokwuosa , @fergushunter , @scottlucas , @elle_hunt , and @cwarzel Tweets: Dare Obasanjo / @carnage4life : Social media creates context collapse, where comments that are fine to make to friends & family are called out by the public for their racism & sexism. Cancel culture comes out of this but it's clearly a human versus technology problem. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ... Jim Waterson / @jimwaterson : On ‘cancel culture’ and what is happening: “Maybe we were never meant to shout across a room of millions, and maybe the people who designed the room should be held responsible.” https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ... Brad / @bradesposito : I would argue that we can blame everyone, but this is quite good https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ... Matt Kilcoyne / @mrjkilcoyne : Buzzfeed is one of the tech companies that used cancel culture extensively to try and profit. https://twitter.com/... Virginia Murr / @verba_et_vertus : If you read nothing else today. Read this article. All of it. “The ‘trending’ culture that technology companies have built has created the illusion that whatever a few people are yelling about online is what really matters on any given day. It's all smoke and mirrors.” https://twitter.com/... Matt Stickland / @landofsticks : “But heralding themselves as champions of free speech on ginormous scales just obfuscates their actual purpose: to monetize our interactions in order to grow.” https://www.buzzfeed.com/... Anthony Wilson-Smith / @awilsonsmith : On various fronts, @elamin88 has become one of the smartest, most incisive and must-read voices around. As he shows here -again. https://twitter.com/... Anthony Reinhart / @ajreinhart : “Maybe we were never meant to shout across a room of millions, and maybe the people who designed the room should be held responsible for the echo that bounces off the walls perpetually until we mistake it for conversation.” Cogent insights from @elamin88 https://twitter.com/... Jessica Johnson / @ejessicajohnson : I think about this a lot: “Our behaviors on these platforms are too often conflated with who we are. This is to our detriment. We forget that the platforms themselves impact behaviour, mediate it, intercept it, and reframe it.” Great story by @elamin88 https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ... Amanda Quraishi / @imtheq : This is a great piece but it's too convenient to place 100% of the problem with our current lack of digital civics on platform owners. Shitty digital cultures existed long before Facebook and Twitter. There's plenty of blame to go around. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ... Christopher Kozal Brennan / @ckozalbrennan : “The “trending” culture that technology companies have built has created the illusion that whatever a few people are yelling about online is what really matters on any given day. It's all smoke and mirrors” @elamin88 https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ... Elamin Abdelmahmoud / @elamin88 : I wrote for @reader: Cancel culture is not a coherent ideology or a rot at the core of liberalism. Yes, the way we talk on the internet is broken, but it's a technology problem, not a people problem. Platforms should have to answer for this. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ... Jay Rosen / @jayrosen_nyu : “'We're trending and worried about it' is not just cause. The villain you're looking for — the real cancel culture — is at-will employment, and the ability of employers to dismiss an employee without legitimate reasons.” https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ... Stephanie McNeal / @stephemcneal : YES. This is a huge problem. How can we as media fix this? https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ... https://twitter.com/... Larry Cornies / @cornies : “Algorithms intent on driving more emotional content to users have allowed for thriving hyperpartisan echo chambers that hinge on feeding an outrage machine.” https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ... via @elamin88 Ashley / @ashleyokwuosa : “So many critiques of “cancel culture” are missing the disease for the symptoms. The actual problem is that we've been given faulty technological tools with which to have a digital conversation.” https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ... via @elamin88 Fergus Hunter / @fergushunter : This piece by @elamin88 is outrageously good. Nails many key points about how social media platforms have warped discourse and fuelled “cancel culture”. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ... Scott Lucas / @scottlucas : “The way we talk on the internet is broken, and users are not the ones who broke it — tech companies did that, and they did it for profit.” https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ... via @elamin88 Elle Hunt / @elle_hunt : “The way we talk on the internet is broken, and users are not the ones who broke it — tech companies did that, and they did it for profit” YES https://twitter.com/... Charlie Warzel / @cwarzel : best thing i've read about the internet in quite a while https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ...
Context & Ripple Effects
Elamin Abdelmahmoud's argument lands a year after Twitter was still being credited with giving young and marginalized voices their first mainstream audience — the 2010s case that made the platform look like a civic good — and it flips that framing: if Facebook and Twitter want to be treated as the new public square, they inherit accountability for how that square behaves. His core claim is that cancel culture is a design problem, rooted in context collapse rather than user malice.
That mechanism has since been documented on the platform itself: [[a:965252|Twitter's Trending Topics surface news stripped of context, leaving disparate audiences lecturing past each other]]. The debate over whether social media is actually bad for society remains split among researchers, but the design critique gives both camps a concrete object to argue about.
First-order effects
- Facebook and Twitter face a sharpened accountability question at the Congressional level: Rep. Jim Jordan's hearing question signals that platform design — algorithms and trending features — can be examined as a cause of pile-ons, not just a neutral conduit.
Second-order effects
- If platforms are held responsible for context collapse, the competitive edge shifts toward alternatives already positioning against feed-driven discourse: human-curated "slow media" proposals and federated networks like Mastodon paired with growing willingness to pay for content.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points toward distribution-layer liability becoming the frame for platform regulation: companies claiming public-square status invite the duties of one, pushing the industry toward either engineered friction in ranking and surfacing or fragmentation into smaller, curated spaces.
The trend: Public pressure is moving online-discourse debates from blaming users toward holding platform architecture — feeds, trends, and ranking — accountable, opening space for federated and curated alternatives.