That

Rihanna and raise awareness for survivors of domestic violence.

Tabloids were the ones drawing attention to this at the time, but it was heavily downplayed, focusing on gossip that were most of the time biased and coming from a personal opinion rather than sources.

Let’s look at Justin Timberlake. He would have been canceled in the early 2000s if the actions of men bore any true consequences back then. The controversial 2004 Super Bowl halftime show’s “wardrobe malfunction” — which revealed Janet Jackson’s breasts — resulted in praise for Timberlake instead of a callout. Instead of apologizing — because the accident was caused by his hands pulling on more fabric than necessary — he told Access Hollywood, “Hey, man, we love giving y’all something to talk about.” What could have passed as an accident became a career turning point for Janet Jackson, whose life never fully recovered after the incident, while Timberlake remained in the limelight unscathed. This incident that would have resulted in his being canceled today was applauded by the media back in 2004.

Instead, tabloids mostly focused on tearing down female celebrities while praising male artists for similar behaviors. Timberlake once violently attacked a paparazzi alongside Cameron Diaz, his then-girlfriend, in “selfdefense” after the cameramen jumped out of the bushes. This incident failed to make waves, yet the infamous Britney Spears umbrella attack in 2007 was widely shared in the tabloids, as well as pictures of her shaved head before this incident. This stalking from the paparazzis became a turning point for her public and private life; her mental health gained popularity as a topic for tabloids who used her “meltdown” to sell their magazines and gain clicks.

She was branded a freak. Justin Timberlake, for revealing Janet Jackson’s breasts on live TV, was hailed as a hero.

Tabloids and gossip

blogs such as TMZ and Just Jared were responsible for these kinds of headlines. Their audiences consisted of men that would not consider what they were reading “gossip,” since the content mostly just sexualized and degraded women. TMZ also specialized in publishing invasive celebrity videos — which were later posted on the newlylaunched YouTube — giving fans the sensation of peering into a small part of the celebrity’s life.

The difference in treatment between male and female celebrities, as well as the sensational headlines tabloids and bloggers would employ for clicks and money was widely popular amongst readers and not condemned during this empire. A little over a decade later, these same people are being harshly criticized for their actions. While they have now transitioned to creating social media content and have since adopted a straightforward delivery style that does not offend anyone, the #MeToo movement and, more recently, the Framing Britney Spears documentary, have shaped them in a new light. Screenshots of old articles have resurfaced, showing the full extent of the toxicity of 2000s tabloids and how harmful their content was to those targeted.

Perez Hilton, a notorious blogger from this empire, used his signature white scrawl that appeared over pictures to usually degrade celebrities he’d share rumors about. It was a type of humor that was considered entertaining by many back in the day, with his blog achieving over 8.82 million pageviews a day — majority women — where he attacked celebrities to gain clicks without fear. He helped shape people’s usually negative views of celebrities like Spears, criticizing her parenting often, or claiming the singer was addicted to drugs. He has since lost traffic on his dedicated website, and transitioned to social media, and his posts now consist of not-so-sensationalist leads with only traces of his trademark still present. Hilton has since apologized for the way he had treated celebrities in the late 2000s. Is he actually sorry did this apology come and other bloggers like Gossip are now being canceled?

Hilton’s career has not recovered, even though he still has an online presence. Similarly, Elaine Liu from Lainey of increased accessibility to the Internet as well as the popularity of blogs, which created an easy approach to gossip about celebrities. What gave tabloids the power they held was their manipulative headlines and harsh criticism. Celebrities were either afraid of them or took advantage of this culture to rise to stardom. One off-guard moment and they’d be on websites and of taking advantage of “apology culture” to clear her name. Liu has been accused of racism and homophobia for past headlines due to comments she’s made about Black female celebrities, as well as the children of celebrities. blogger admits using those tactics to grow her site in 2003 and 2004, claiming that misogynist and slut shaming were popular among readers. Lui said, “As the site grew in popularity, it served as confirmation bias, that there was an appetite out there for this kind of content and I wanted to keep delivering it.” She believes that she has grown from her past mistakes and learned, “along with many of you who have learned and grown.”

In a now deleted post from January of 2005, for example, Lui comments on Sundance Film Festival appearances, she comments how Pamela Anderson was able to “stop f*cking” her manager “long enough to catch a flight” to attend the festival. Lui also commented on Anderson’s “fake tits looking like a frightful mess this morning,” and that was just one of the misogynist words used to describe female celebrities that attended the same event.

The tabloid craze of the 2000s was a result

On September 6, 2009, the tweet “#uknowurblackwhen u cancel plans when its raining ‘’ started getting noticed online. A simple hashtag caught many young Black users who shared their own experience, as well as getting funny and creative for the likes of the platform. What was not expected at the time was to have this hashtag go viral. Within the first two hours, it spread over Twitter so quickly that 1.2% of all Twitter traffic revolved around it as Black users responded with their own stories. The author of this tweet, Ashley Weatherspoon — who worked as personal assistant and social media strategy for celebrities like Adrienne Bailon (Cheetah Girls) — was simply testing out hashtags. At the time, this new gadget was a fun way to share stories and experiences under the same thread.

This viral episodecan be considered the start of Black Twitter.

More than a decade later, Black Twitter has become a trendsetter, capable of creating and shaping popular culture and memes, as well as being the portal for social justice causes like the Black Lives Matter and Me Too movements. Canceling someone was just another conversation within this community that then spread out and became something bigger until it got out of hand.

Weatherspoon’s presence grew on the platform, reaching over 18.4 thousand followers, following which she founded “Dear Young Queen,” a blog where she encourages women to find their voices and passions. A queen herself, her profile photo on Twitter is her wearing a crown, and her very first viral tweet with the #uknowurblackwhen pinned at the top of her tweets.

“Canceling”

The term “cancel culture” has been used on online platforms as a way to call out people, especially celebrities, that have been “problematic.” Putting this word in quotes is important because there are no guidelines to define it. People find any excuse to cancel someone nowadays, endangering that person’s career and putting them on the same level as those who actually deserve to be called out. The vocabulary comes from Black culture. Around 1980 when Chic member Nile Rodgers went on a date at a club, his date attempted to use his celebrity status to push people around; this was a dealbreaker for the guitarist, who stopped seeing the woman after the incident. One night after the fact Rodgers decided to sit down and write some music, coming up with lyrics that would be part of a song for the band’s new album Take It Off from 1981.

“Your Love is Cancelled”

… Watching the late show

I made up my mind, oh

A love that is free like a love should be

Fallin’ behind, oh

Don’t you see you are the one

I couldn’t have begun

No, Your love is cancelled

…

This was the first time the word “cancel” was repurposed for the idea of calling out a person for unacceptable behaviors. The song did not chart, and was concealed by the band’s many triumphant songs later in their career as well as their disco music like Le Freak and Good Times

The song, however, inspired screenwriter Barry Michael Cooper, who was writing a new gangster movie in the late 1980s. When New Jack City was released in 1991, the vocabulary was used as a way to get rid of someone, calling out an unacceptable behavior. Nino Brown, a narcissist drug boss finds himself being reprimanded by his girlfriend. He then grabs her head, throws her on a conference table and pours champagne on her. “Cancel that b*&$@, I’ll buy a new one.” says the gangster, as a way of breaking up with the girl.

At the time, while the concept was barely used in pop culture, it was occasionally utilized by the Black community that had watched the movie. The word was also used by rappers in the 2000s, like when Lil Wayne references the movie in his 2010 song I’m Single by saying “Yeah, I’m single / n***a had to cancel that bitch like Nino.”

As years went by and social media grew in popularity, it was easier than ever to comment on TV and entertainment with friends and followers who shared similar interests. That was the case with a 2014 episode of Love & Hip Hop, New York, when music producer Cisco Rosado tells his girlfriend Diamond Strawberry “Get away from me, you’re canceled,” without any context. The scene was funny enough that it blew up on Black Twitter. Later, the music producer revealed that he had watched New Jack City the night before the scene aired, giving him the inspiration to use the terminology in the heat of the moment.

As this moment was unexpected, people loved the expression enough to start talking about it online. Black Twitter used “cancel” as an attempt to keep anyone or anything at arm’s length. The meaning was evolving, but it was still a personal decision, a way with which to say they didn’t like something anymore — like changing the channel after watching a show because it was boring. It gave them some power to control the narrative of their multiple reasons. They start trends that are utilized by the rest of us in our daily online presence, and trend that they created is being voice they had online, the expression has now taken transformed into a concept that gives ordinary people power to call out irresponsible acts while possibly harming innocent people. The nonBlack community took a hold of this new, funny idea of canceling someone you don’t agree with, taking it as far as ending one’s career, removing the cultural aspect of the term.

Around the same time, another social media was exploding amongst young people: Vine.

On June 21, 2014, a trend was born out of a seat of a car in South Chicago. “We in this bitch. Finna get crunk. Eyebrows on fleek. Da fuq,” said Kayla Newman, better known as Peaches Monroee, on social media. A simple six second video of this young woman admiring her eyebrows, wearing her glasses and a headband filled with a flower pattern while in the car got over 50 million loops (replays) on Vine, as well as millions of views once uploaded on YouTube. This was the beginning of a trend that was “Eyebrows on Fleek.”

This new vocabulary entered people’s daily lives immediately, trending on social media as a hashtag, and ascending to almost becoming an officialized language in people’s dictionaries. Brands started employing this term in their advertisements, in hopes of reaching a young audience, while also making profits out of this trend. The creator of eyebrows on fleek, however, never got anything in exchange for something she started. Newman was left in the background, while mainstream media grew richer from a trend invented by a Black creator.

Content-sharing among black users has been the start of popular trends online. Vine, for example, only allowed short videos to be made, requiring creators to be as creative as possible. Its majority of trends were also created by the black community of the app, yet the company did not help promote their content on the main page like Tiktok has been doing nowadays. By the time Vine died in 2016, many of its creators were forgotten, and only a select few stars transcended after the app was purchased by Twitter.

Even the ex-Vine stars that were able to continue their careers post-app were not able to avoid canceling due to their content. King Bach, a

Black Canadian-American comedian who reached over 19 million followers and became the mostfollowed person on Vine. His content was based on a cartoon version of himself; an exaggerated and loud person, which years later Black Twitter started to call him out for further stereotyping the Black community.

Periodically, people started to revisit his content and notice the problematic emblem of his content. King Bach has been accused of further developing a negative Black stereotype, like the absent father and robbery sketches. One video from June of 2015 captioned “When you get robbed and bae still owes you money, he is seen acting alongside another Vine star Amanda Cerny, who acts as his girlfriend when a robber approaches them. After a zoom into Cerny’s face, it cuts to King Bach sitting on the robber’s shoulders demanding money that she “owed” him. While some saw this and many other robbery sketches as comedy, others saw similarities to the stereotyped the Black community suffers from. The “cancellation” was well talked about in 2020, when people had more free time revisiting the past due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and his name even appeared in the trending topics of Twitter due to the debate of the ethics behind his content.

While this was happening, another platform was growing expeditiously. TikTok was filled with sketches about being bored in the house, quarantine dogs watching people through the windows, and countless dance videos that changed dancing on social media. Influencers would copy the (sometimes) easy movements that did not require much movement around the space through the use of popular music. Even the music industry changed because of this social media — many artists like Jason Derulo focused on a younger audience and catchy melody for the app, realizing the new strategy of making songs go viral. White influencers — like the (now) second most followed Charli D’Amelio and fourth most-followed Addison Rae — would recreate popular dances and receive millions of views, bumping them into several “for you” pages.

However, similarly to Vine, most of the trends that we see on the app were created by Black content creators, but this time, these influencers demanded being credited when used because of how easy it is to steal content on TikTok. While they created awesome choreographies and continued underpromoted on the app, white influencers would be the ones rewarded with views and recognition.

In March of 2021, Jimmy Fallon invited Addison Rae to dance on The Tonight Show. The popular dances at the time included Cardi B’s Up, Popp Hunna’s Corvette Corvette, and Megan Thee Stallion’s Savage. The controversy behind this “challenge” from The Tonight Show was that a white TikToker was dancing to choreographies invented by Black creators, and no credits were given to the inventors on the show. These smaller POC accounts like Keara Wilson, the Savage dance creator, would only be known by the credits people of the app leave as a way to indicate the original influencer to create the trend.

Since Rae appeared in the show last year, Fallon and The Tonight Show have invited the original creators of the dances to the show as a group interview. Mya Nicole Johnson and Chris Coffer (Up dance), Dorien Scott (Corvette Corvette), Fly Boy Fu (Laffy Taffy remix artist), Indii (Laffy Taffy remix dance) and Keara Wilson (Savage) appeared on the show to talk about the viral dances and perform them live. Even though they were given space and recognition for their work and creativity, they each only had about two minutes to be introduced to the audience, while Rae had a segment on the show for herself. Credits where it’s due, Fallon and his team immediately addressed the controversy and even though it was short, they gave these influencers a place to show their content and receive the recognition they deserve.

Cancel Culture

This way, the media has been called out for the lack of attention given to Black creators on several platforms for over a decade. The idea of “call-outs” as cancellation took off around 2015 and 2016, but the concept was not. Calling out a celebrity for their actions was a thing for a decade, and artists like Justin Timberlake and Chris Brown have been boycotted due to their problematic behavior prior to the cancellation era.

However, it has become a lifestyle for Twitter users. If a certain person does something that one does not agree with, they are immediately canceled. If they have a different political view, they are also canceled. If they tweeted something inappropriate when they were twelve, they would be canceled.

There are, however, movements like #MeToo which called out the abusers and sexual assaults from within the entertainment industry, as well as other workspaces and life in general, bringing awareness to the long-term effects of crimes against these victims.

When studying media, there is a crucial point to be evaluated: how the public participates in the media. In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962), Jürgen Habesmas explains the concept of Public Sphere as a “virtual or imaginary community which does not necessarily exist in any identifiable space,” being “made up of private people gathered together as a public and articulating the needs of society with the state.” It has been 60 years since the concept was created and yet it is as relevant today as it was back then. Social media is a public sphere where people hide behind their screens, giving them the confidence to comment about anything and anyone without the fear of the consequences. It is considered freedom of speech, giving everyone the right to express their opinions, but that also means that it is easy to steal an idea and pose it as original content, or replicate a Tweet as yours and not give credit where it is due. That way, Black Twitter’s content started to be transferred into the general public of the social media and appropriated as everyone’s culture.

In 2010, as Youtube started growing as a platform for people to make content, a 23-year-old woman with big blue eyes posted a video titled How to trick people into thinking you’re good looking. In this less than three minute video, the woman makes fun of beauty standards by explaining how she had self-tanned and put contacts on to look more beautiful. With a sarcastic tone, she gives step-by-step tips on how to look good through that year’s beauty trends: black eye makeup with bright pink lipstick, straight bleached blond hair and fake eyelashes.

This video goes viral on the platform, putting Jenna Marbles into the spotlight and gaining followers that helped jumpstart her career on YouTube. A decade later, on June 15, 2020, Marbles uploaded her last video onto her channel. With about 20 million subscribers, she had decided to leave the platform after over ten years of using it, by explaining her past mistakes in a 11-minute video titled A Message. The video has Marbles in a comfortable setting, in her living room wearing a blue sweater and wearing no makeup, with her hair up in a bun, talking about her decision to abandon her channel. She apologizes for several past videos — that are now private — taking herself accountable for contents that might have upset people when they first came out.

Marbles uses her 2011 video where she characterizes as Nicki Minaj, wearing blackface and a pink wig, imitating the rapper as an example. Even though this and several other old posts of her channel were private for a few years prior to uploading the “goodbye” video, she apologizes for offending people and that even though she had no intention of causing pain, it does not reflect her beliefs anymore, therefore taking it off her page.

Ten years is a long time for a person to change, and Marbles grew older in front of the cameras, so has her beliefs, as she chose to private them as a way to avoid offending any more people. Even then, in the era of cancel culture, people had asked her to comment and apologize for her past mistake, some going as far as canceling the former YouTuber.

Despite apologizing, Marbles had made up her mind. Her departure took the online world by surprise, causing her name to go on the trending topics on Twitter. There were supportive people, understanding how tiring it is to make content for over a decade, and those criticizing cancel culture for pushing her out of YouTube.

Marbles’ biggest critics were coming from a place of privilege, who were surfing the wave of cancel culture and trying to take someone accountable for their mistakes. There were also various Black influencers that jumped into this news and denounced White twitter for forcing one of the biggest YouTubers out of her platform for something Marbles has apologized for in the past.

YouTuber Pearl Swirl, who usually created reacting videos, commented on Marbles’ video while putting her makeup on. She started by saying that Marbles was an iconic figure on the platform and that she was never supposed to leave YouTube, claiming she expected to see Marbles’ funeral live from the influencer’s channel. Another comment on Twitter from @SkyWilliams says that “we need to CELEBRATE REFORM AND CHANGE instead of condemning the past.”

What upset people the most about her leaving was the fact that she had always recognized her mistakes and continuously apologized for it. However, with the COVID-19 pandemic keeping people inside their homes for a long amount of time, it was easy for an audience to go back to old videos and remind social media of past comments that should be taken accountable for. Marbles left YouTube while other content creators that have ongoing issues of homophobia, sexism, and racism are still utilizing the platform even after being called out and canceled — think Shane Dawson, who has made comments about pedophilia and has done blackface in past videos. He disappeared from social media in 2020 after being canceled just to come back as if nothing happened.

Twitter as Career Tool

Social media now has the ability to manage a career, therefore the idea that having celebrities on Twitter gave us the sensation of being close to our favorite artists in the early 2010s does not exist anymore. They have an image to protect, and one wrong tweet can end their careers nowadays.

Chrissy Teigen, for example, went from being a Twitter queen to being canceled. The model, TV host, and wife of singer John Legend grew in popularity on the platform for being “just like us:” funny, candid, with uncensored humor. Some of her jokes came at the expense of other figures, but it was acceptable when her rude tweets were aimed at the ex-President Donald Trump. Her comments were so popular that Trump went on a Twitter rampage before blocking her on the platform. It was amusing for her followers because it was aimed at someone that was widely despised, but things quickly turned for the worst.

In 2021, Courtney Stodden, who got fame at the age of sixteen when they married 51-year-old actor Doug Hutchinson in 2011, came out with their side of the story about their marriage. Stodden claims they had been abused and taken advantage of by their now-ex-husband due to their young age at the time. This was also when Twitter had gotten big, making them an easy target for jokes and comments that were often impolite. Chrissy Teigen was one of their offenders, who tweeted mean words to the child bride.

Old tweets resurfaced immediately, proving how rude the then-26-year-old model had been to a child. Teigen apologized on the platform, claiming that she was “an insecure, attention seeking troll,” and that even though she’s embarrassed by her actions, “nothing compared to how [she] made Courtney feel.” She also claimed to have tried to connect with Stodden in private, but since this had gotten public attention, she saw the need to openly apologize as well.

Except Teigen still had Stodden blocked on Twitter, which proof was shared on their Instagram page. They claim to forgive Teigen, but that they never heard from her in private. As a result, Teigen lost brand deals, as well as having her products taken out of stores as a way to disassociate them from her after the scandal — the famous boycott from companies in order to save themselves.

This shows how Twitter and entertainment changed over the decade. Being rudely funny was accepted and once a good way to rise to fame on the platform. However, with cancel culture being present on social media, the past and the present of users are being taken for granted, causing their careers to take the impact from their mistakes or being rightfully called out for hurtful comments. Calling out a celebrity - or anyone — for their mistake came out to become a culture. Canceling someone is giving power that only tabloids and news platforms had for years to ordinary people on social media. What started as a joke in the Black community was spread and misappropriated by the rest of the Internet, becoming a commodity. Celebrities who already had to be careful with their image in real life are needing to be strategic with what they comment as well. There is a difference between calling someone out for their action and possibly letting them redeem themselves by learning to become a better version of themselves and canceling someone for a mistake that could have been harmless and “ending” their careers immediately. On the other hand, it becomes difficult to draw a line between what is a harmless mistake and what deserves to end careers. Does Chrissy Teigan deserve a second chance? Has she learned from a mistake from ten years ago? It is difficult to tell, as she has been “canceled” for over a year now but she still has a large following on Twitter who believes in her change.