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…