Abstract

Over the years social media has become a place of entertainment but also a platform for individuals to share gossip and opinions on topical issues, people and groups. This paper explores the good and the bad side of cancel culture and how it can affect online identity in different ways. We draw upon the case of Sienna Mae Gomez where the online advocacy she was involved in lead to her getting cancelled on social media platform. We dive deep into how it affects her and how she manages to come back by reinvesting in her identity, proving the online community wrong. It overall highlights how the factors of online cyberbullying and mental health can make an impact on the person getting cancelled and how it forces them to either create a new identity or reinvest in their original one. On the other hand, we will also discuss how the idea of cancel culture can have a positive outlook by the way it creates a sense of an online community and participatory culture.

Introduction

In today’s digital world, social media has become massive and has changed the way individuals, businesses and groups communicate and express themselves. From starting off as a source of entertainment, social media has grown into being more than just that. Most of the time social media is a safe and positive space, but at times there are several issues which challenge this, one major one being online advocacy leading to cancel culture and change in identities. What do I mean by cancel culture? Well, cancel culture is defined as the “mass withdrawal of support from public figures or celebrities that have done things that aren’t socially acceptable today” (Merriam-Webster, 2025). This issue occurs all throughout social media, but particularly to online influencers who get most of it. With issues that spread across social media involving influencers, it makes followers pick sides and form groups on a particular opinion. This can be a good thing and a bad thing, as it can lead to harmful consequences for people involved. It’s important that we can have this sense of community and participatory culture with the online community; however, it needs to be regenerated in a way that prevents any harm. There are many factors to think about within the idea of cancel culture such as how does online advocacy create it, and what happens to people’s identities?

Online Advocacy Influences Cancel Culture

Online advocacy has become major over the last few years and has become something that helps promote public opinions and allows others to be able to express their passion or concern over controversial or big topics of conversation. Online or digital advocacy is known to be “the use of technology to create, promote, and mobilise support for a particular cause or campaign” (Quorum, 2025). Cancel culture has become a factor that’s intertwined with online advocacy where people are pushing for change, calling out wrong behaviour and sticking to their morals and values. There have been many issues that have been brought up and discussed over social media, like the #MeToo movement, Black Lives Matter and the #GirlsLikeUs campaigns. After reading an article about the ‘Girls Like Us’ campaign, it showed that obviously there were people against the idea of trans females, but after using the hashtag over the media, it had gotten trans women around the world to share their experiences and how they relate. (Jackson, Bailey, Welles, 2017). This clearly is a great example of how the online community has used this online advocacy about trans women and turned it into a positive community of people sharing their views on the issue. That online advocacy shows how to create a positive community; however, as previously mentioned, advocacy is also involved with cancel culture, which incorporates both positive and negative aspects. A good example of this that happened years ago was the Sienna Mae Gomez and the Jack Wright controversy. In 2021 Sienna Mae Gomez was accused of sexually assaulting Jack Wright. This issue highlights how powerful the community can be about online advocacy but also the downfall it can bring on a human being. Jack Wright had come out with a video which went viral of him calling out what Sienna had done. As this is an issue that is quite serious and controversial in society, it spiralled all over TikTok, with people automatically taking the blame to Sienna and hitting her comments sections with hate and accusations. There was even a video that was being shared around that people would comment under, expressing their thoughts. After all this, people did not believe Sienna, which led to her losing over 1 million followers (Pearcy, 2022). This online issue had clearly shown how the community engages in online advocacy, as people started to make videos explaining their thoughts, commenting on her old videos addressing the issue and making accusation of the sexual assault. Yes, people should call out for people to take accountability for their actions, but for this situation, no legal evidence had been shown, and people are just making assumptions and accusing her of something that they don’t know the full truth of. Because of this, it spreads misinformation and causes backlash, leading to permanent reputational damage. This whole thing, though, really portrayed the idea of participatory culture within the community. Henry Jenkins in 2006 defined participatory culture as “a way in which different people or the society act both as consumers and contributors of meaning and further play a major role in shaping content” (Singo, 2020).

Identity after Cancel Culture

After being involved in online advocacy and being cancelled, a lot of the time businesses or influencers are either forced to reinvent their identities or try to build their identities back to prove they haven’t changed. Identities are basically how the public perceive you and what values or morals you portray towards your audience. Leaver (2015) had mentioned in one of her blogs that “Scholars researching how these early identity traces circulate and what they mean will have to look beyond individual agency; rather, at the very least, situating identity formation and publishing on social media as a group activity centred initially on the family” (Leaver, 2015). This resonates, as influencers and users’ identities are completely shaped by what types of stuff they post and how the public react and perceive it. Whereas in cancel culture, if the person involved does posts, they would see how people perceived in that new way through those interactions and engagement on the post. Looking back at the Sienna example, before all this advocacy, she had people perceive her as someone who is spreading awareness about young females and body positivity, which, after the accusations, people started to believe was all fake and that she wasn’t who everyone thought she was. In the book ‘A Networked Self’, Papacharissi had referred to posting online as being the same as ‘graffiti’. He stated the quote from Rodriguez and Clair (1999), “Graffiti are participatory exchanges: An individual writes a message which others independently observe and to which they potentially reply” (Papacharissi, 2010). How does this relate to identity? Well, followers and observers like to throw out what they think of brands or influencers once they have heard accusations, which, by reading the backlash, led to these influencers being forced to reinvest or to prove their original identities. This then all brings back to the idea of risky interpersonal identity exploration, which relates to the way coming back from cancel culture forces people to reinvest their identity online to show those who support her that their perspectives of her before the backlash shouldn’t change. Risky interpersonal identity exploration “refers to the notion that teenagers develop their social sense of self through exploratory interpersonal interactions; trying out different viewpoints, commitments, jokes, expressive gestures and the like, and seeing and adapting to how their peers respond in return” (Grunsven, Marin, 2024). Being cancelled led people to reinvest in their identity, which Sienna did by creating her swimwear brand to keep enforcing her value of promoting body positivity. She also created blogs and came out to speak about her experience of being cancelled and how she built herself back up. As Sienna shared the truth, the online community then took a stand again about the new issue of false accusations of sexual assault, and this turned into more advocacy and further debate.

The DARK side of cancel culture

I’ve mainly highlighted the positives that come out of cancel culture and how it brings the online community together; however, there is a whole other side that isn’t recognised enough. A highly criticised issue over social media is cyberbullying, which happens every single day. Would you consider cancel culture being a part of this? Majority of the time, there are reasons behind why people are being ‘cancelled’; however, everyone combining online and being a strong force reaching out for accountability, can this be considering some sort of bullying? After reading this journal article by Orsolya Bajusz  “Cancel Culture or the Realpolitik of the participatory turn”, he stated a quote by Africa book which had defined cancel culture as “crowd-sourced abuse”, and can be likened to pack hunting, where a group collaborates to pursue a solitary target, akin to  fox  hunting  with  a  pack  of  dogs” (Bajusz, 2023). This was very interesting as she describes the online community as being “dogs” which reflects the idea that we are quite aggressive, and we target very harshly online. It is important that we call out people’s behaviour and call out for some sort of accountability, but having thousands of people spamming your socials can become harsh and lead to high amounts of pressure upon an individual. Therefore, there have been times this has occurred and has had major impacts on their mental health and have psychological effects. What happened to the sayings “everyone makes mistakes” and “it’s their first time living”? It now seems we don’t even consider those points anymore, and all we care about is putting our word in. Once again looking at Siennas case, she was forced to get off social media platforms as the amount of backlash and harmful comments she was receiving had a negative toll on her mental health. She took a whole three years off media as she took time to gain back her identity and look after her own health. Three years is a huge part of someone’s life, especially being at her age she should not have to. This even makes it worse as social media was a huge part of her life which she was on every single day creating content for her supporters.

What needs to happen? Is it going to happen?

The topic of cancel culture overall is a hard one to understand, as there are many positives but also negatives with it that at times can override those positives. Is there a way to combine both to be able to have cancel culture be acceptable but also have its boundaries so it doesn’t get too out of hand? I personally think in society we need to have limits to cancel culture and should ensure we have the legal information before making accusations. We can turn cancel culture into a process where we can come together as a community and take a stand on issues but do it in a more cautious way. We should start to consider that there are real human beings futures and lives involved, and we should be teaching them rather than heavily backlashing them in order to move forward.

Conclusion

Overall, we can see how deeply intertwined identities and online advocacy are when it comes to cancel culture on online social media platforms. It has highlighted the fact that cancel culture has its positives and its negatives and that there needs to be a change in our online community to make cancel culture acceptable, but to also regenerate its ways to reduce the harmful impact it can have on individuals. After exploring the case study of Sienna Mae Gomez and Jack Wright. It’s clear that at times the public can take cancellation extremely far by spreading online advocacy without knowing the full truth. Online influencers or even brands shouldn’t have to reinvest or prove their own identities because of online advocacy that is taken out of proportion. As a community we need to find a way that we can stand up for what is right and call out accountability without leading to these severe consequences.

Reference List

Bajusz, O. (2024). Cancel Culture or the Realpolitik of the Participatory Turn. An International Journal of Pure Communications Inquiry, 12(2), 29-42. https://folyoirat.ludovika.hu/index.php/kome/article/view/7621/5972

Grunsven, J., Marin, L. (2024). Technosocial disruption, enactivism, & social media: On the overlooked risk of teenage cancel culture. Technology in Society, 78(102602), 1-10. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160791X24001507#sec2

Heller, C. (2022, 27). A Comprehensive Breakdown of All the Drama Between TikTok’s Jack Write and Sienna Mae: Jack write has accused Sienna Mae of touching him inappropriately on multiple occasions and manipulating him emotionally. She has issued a responded denying allegation. E News. https://www.eonline.com/news/1317603/a-comprehensive-breakdown-of-all-the-drama-between-tiktoks-jack-wright-and-sienna-mae

Jackson, S., Bailey, M., Welles, B. (2017). #GirlsLikeUs: Trans advocacy and community building online. Sage Journals, 20(5), 1868-888. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10.1177/1461444817709276

Papacharissi, Z. (2010). A Networked Self: Identity, Community and Culture on Social Network Sites (#1.). Taylor and Francis Group. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/curtin/reader.action?docID=574608&ppg=42

Pearcy, A. (2022, 1). TikTok star Sienna Mae Gomez has lost 1 million followers since she was accused of sexual assault by Jack Wright. Business Insider.https://www.businessinsider.com/sienna-mae-gomez-loses-1-million-tiktok-followers-2022-1

Singo. (2020). Henry Jenkins theory of participatory culture and social media. LinkedIn. http://linkedin.com/pulse/henry-jenkinss-theory-participatory-culture-social-media-singo/

Slyt, D. (2025). Cancel culture. Merriam-Webster. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cancel%20culture

Quorum. (2023). A beginners guide to developing digital advocacy campaigns. Quorum. https://www.quorum.us/blog/digital-advocacy-101/