Has someone been cancelled as a purely grassroots effort before? It seems like the seeds of a cancelling may begin this way, but quasi-journalists, pundits and other online personalities are the engine that does the crucial amplification to reach broader public discourse.
I think their is an interesting sort of 'laundering' of attribution where social media power brokers can point to the seeds and say "Look at this grassroots movement that is changing the way society views X", and then the issue is broadcast to a much wider audience. However, that small grassroots movement may not have been seriously affected X except for the effects of the power brokers' pointing fingers.
It seems like these social media power brokers may not even intend to have this effect in some cases, but they are a crucial step in the cancelling lifecycle.
Country stations stopped playing their songs because listeners would call in to complain, threaten boycotts, etc.
While I'm struggling to remember exact successes, I know the Parents Television Council would use petitions to cancel programming that they deemed inappropriate.
They hated the Simpsons, which is now the longest running show in US history, I believe.
Lets looks at Gina Carano for example. She was "cancelled" (fired from her job) as the direct result of her social media posting things a large number of people found offensive and inappropriate, not a small amount. 10 anonymous people didn't cause it, hundreds of thousands of people thought it was wrong.
Even if that’s accurate, doesn’t necessarily reflect the opinion of the broader public.
> Jews were beaten in the streets, not by Nazi soldiers but by their neighbors…even by children.
> "Because history is edited, most people today don't realize that to get to the point where Nazi soldiers could easily round up thousands of Jews, the government first made their own neighbors hate them simply for being Jews.
> "How is that any different from hating someone for their political views."
What's new is social media's ability to amplify the voices of a small number of relatively anonymous people to "cancel" someone.
McCarthyism required a Senator to have a serious impact. Now people are cancelled, without there being a clear link back to who, exactly, did the cancelling.