The Viral Spread of Cancel Culture: a deeper look at the canceling of Doja Cat , May of 2020
By: A. Eo
Tags: Quarantine, Cancel Culture, Twitter, Social Media, Doja Cat

One of the most memorable moments of cancel culture was the spring of 2020, when the rising star and singer-songwriter Doja Cat was vilified on Twitter. Videos were leaked and went viral of the singer participating in online video chatrooms that commonly attracted alt-right and white supremacists. Accusations of her being racist and anti-Black, and rumors that she was into race-play, flew around social media in an attempt to cancel Doja. I was never a huge fan of Doja Cat but still enjoyed her music, so I still somehow got swept up in the bandwagon and watched the toxic drama unfold. This sort of canceling has occurred time and time again, and no one seems to be able to escape it. YouTubers, celebrities, TV anchors, athletes, influencers, and essentially any public figure can fall victim to cancel culture. I decided to look at the canceling of Doja Cat in the May of 2020 to analyze for a project I did in an English class.

Cancel culture has taken a variety of forms. I believe that many participants would believe that it is a form of activism; what could go wrong in calling out and “educating” their faves? Others seem to use it as an excuse to bash public figures or celebrities they already dislike under the guise of activism. Another common way to participate is to jump on the bandwagon of the next trending figure.

What I wanted to analyze was whether or not cancel culture is actually effective. These are the sort of questions that I wanted to ask, and kept asking myself throughout this process: Does canceling work, or is it just a witch hunt? Is canceling an effective form of activism, or is it making social media toxic? Does canceling educate, or does it seem to prioritize sensationalism over talking about important issues? My initial question was: what kind of language is used by those “canceling”, and those “being canceled”, and how does that affect the results of the canceling? I decided to narrow it down by focusing on a recent brandishing of cancel culture that occurred in 2020: Doja Cat’s canceling back in May. This event piqued my interest as I noticed that as quickly #dojacatisoverparty began trending on Twitter, #wearesorrydoja trended followed just as fast. My question then changed to: what kind of language was used in the canceling of Doja Cat during the timespan of May 22–27, 2020?

Rationale and Connection to Course Content:

The last line of Amy Gutmann’s Keynote Address on civility particularly stood out to me: “And it urges us to listen to each other with empathy…to speak to each other with respect…to appreciate one another as fellow members of a great American family…and to cherish not only our rights, but also our responsibilities.” I think Gutmann’s stance on civility, and why it is important in the language we use, directly apply to how we use language on social media. I believe most individuals use social media as a shield or a mask to use language that they might never actually use in person.

Method Collection:

I chose Twitter as the main social media platform to collect my data, observing the hashtags #dojacatisover, #dojacatiscancelled, #canceldojacat, #wearesorrydojacat, and #wesorrydoja. Twitter has an option where users can search tweets within specific time periods. With this search option, I chose a five day interval between May 22, 2020, to May 27, 2020. In order to avoid bias, I chose to look at the top 25 to 30 posts from each hashtag.

Data Analysis and Results:

In a numbered spreadsheet, I made columns for the actual tweet, the hashtag it went under, and my analysis of it (it was mostly to take basic notes to help me decide how to code. After analyzing all the tweets for the hashtags #dojacatisover, #dojacatiscancelled, and #canceldojacat, I decided to code the tweets into informational, defamatory, and bandwagon. An example of an informational tweet would be a tweet that was generally respectful, paired with “proof” (examples being video evidence of Doja Cat participating in the chat rooms, saying the n-word, etc), in order to spread actual awareness of the situation. An example of an informational tweet was: “doja cat is being cancelled for being on tiny chat with racists and being anti-black”. The accusation was also paired with video “proof” of her in the video chats. I coded bandwagon tweets after noticing trends of them not being necessarily defamatory, but also not contributing in an informational way either. Sometimes they were neutral, like a tweet that read — “went through a rabbit hole to figure out why #dojacatisover and I still don’t know what’s going on” — clearly showing that they were using the hashtag without even understanding why it was trending. Many of the times the bandwagon tweets were mocking or an attempt to make humor out of the situation, and borderline defamatory, an example tweet reading: “me listening to my favorite Doja cat song before I remove it from my playlist and cancel her #dojacatisoverparty #dojacatisover #dojacat”. Finally, I categorized defamatory tweets as tweets that purposely tried to take down her reputation. These tweets were generally degrading or derogatory. Many of these tweets called her racist, anti-Black, or accused her of having sexual fantasies of raceplay.

After I collected all my data for actual canceling portion, I also wanted to see how quickly Twitter would bounce back and “apologize”, as there usually is a trend of the general public hating on a celebrity, and then apologizing. I organized these tweets in a very similar way to the previous hashtags. I coded these tweets as either apologetic or as backlash. The apologetic category meant I considered these tweets as genuinely apologies, an example being: “so y’all attacked doja cat with little to no evidence and ran with it for days #wearesorrydoja”. The other category, backlash, meant I considered the tweets as users pushing back, rejecting, or invalidating the apology hashtags, an example being: “who tf is #WeAreSorryDoja. Im not sorry that she’s racist..lol.” These tweets were slightly more difficult to code, as some of them used subtle irony or sarcasm.

Analysis and Discussion of Results:

To analyze the results, I made a data chart to count how many of each tweets fell under the categories I coded. For the canceling hashtags, there were 11 informational tweets, 10 defamatory tweets, and 30 bandwagon tweets. This means that only about one fifth of these tweets were informational, or actually contributed to an educational, civil, or respectful effort in spreading awareness. 30 out of 50, or three fifths of the tweets were bandwagon, meaning many users used Doja Cat’s canceling as a means of entertainment or humor. About one fifth of the tweets were purely defamatory and cared to purposely use bullying language to ruin Doja Cat’s reputation. These results were not too surprising, but I was glad to see that there were not as many defamatory tweets that used bullying language as I thought.

The apology hashtag results were much more interesting. I was surprised to see how quickly these hashtags trended, possibly only hours after the canceling hashtags trended. I assumed it was kickstarted by Doja Cat fans who wanted to defend her. I made a data chart to count that there were 26 backlash tweets, 15 apologetic tweets, and 7 tweets that did not fall under either category. I expected that under these hashtags, there would be significantly more tweets that were genuinely apologetic or pushing back on cancel culture. However, there were 11 more tweets that were coded as backlash against the apology hashtags.

Reflection:

Overall, my hope is that people become more cognizant of others before jumping to conclusions. I personally am not very active on Twitter, but I still have tendencies of believing what I hear and jumping in on the bandwagon. I think, due to groupthink, we would rather go along with the hashtags than take a step back and think critically of the situation. That being said, I still think it is important to educate public figures/influencers on social media if they have done something racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, etc. It just should not be in a way where it causes that person to become stripped of their humanity and dignity. I think people dismiss social media issues as it is associated with teenagers. But that’s what makes it so dangerous, which sets up the precedent of bullying and targeted hate.

Throughout this project, as I delved into a much deeper look at what happened to Doja Cat back in May, I learned that I also jumped to conclusions much too quickly, and that I need to be more careful on the Internet and social media. It was insane how quickly Twitter users turned on Doja Cat, and how quickly they also sent her apologies. I also looked up what happened to her afterwards, to see if there were actual serious consequences of her canceling. I saw that there were articles where an individual, Kane Lavo, claimed he had been lying about her using racist language; Lavo’s claim did match up to Doja Cat’s denial of ever saying racist things in the tinychat rooms. I also found that seven months after the #dojcatiscanceled trended, she won the PUSH New Artist award and was nominated for song of the summer, song of the year, and direction awards at the 2020 VMAs. She also is nominated for the new artist, record, and pop solo performance awards for the 2021 Grammys.

In the grand scheme of things, my opinion on cancel culture and whether or not Doja Cat deserved better treatment on social media does not really matter. She is a wealthy and successful celebrity who will continue to be wealthy and successful. I also do not believe that I am in the position or “forgive” her, as I am not part of the Black community and have no right to accept her apologies. However, I think social media will become a much safer and civil place if users practiced civility and thought twice before jumping on the bandwagon that is to cancel culture. I am still very curious as to how culture will evolve with the rapidly evolving social media communities, and with the rise of different platforms such as TikTok. I am also very curious as to what Twitter users are thinking when they participate in cancel culture. This is the question that I want to ask every user: would you say something you wrote about someone being canceled in a tweet directly to their face?