It was supposed to be a heartwarming moment: Polish star Kamil Majchrzak, fresh off a thrilling win at the recently concluded US Open, handing his sweat-soaked, victory-scented cap to a young fan. But before the boy could clutch it, a businessman Piotr Szczerek (CEO of paving company Drogbruk) lunged like an Indian monkey at a banana to snatch the hat.
The video of the child's stunned expression and the businessman's obliviousness triggered outraged internet sleuths to find the man and flatten his paving company under a one-star rating on Google. The only problem was that the man they targeted was another Polish businessman with a company name that sounded similar.
Benjamin Franklin once observed: "A mob's a monster; heads enough but no brains."
He may have been talking about physical mobs, but today's digital ones are no different. What begins as legitimate calls for social accountability often morphs into a full-blown digital witch hunt, leaving collateral damage in its wake, with almost none deserving the 'punishment' that far outweighs the alleged crimes. These cancel culture warriors from both the Left and Right have turned online outrage into a sport where goalposts shift faster than TikTok trends and punishment outweighs the crime.
This tyranny of online activism (I call it reckless vigilantism) is reshaping not just creative expression and professional consequences, but via political movements like MAGA, is literally redrafting the map of the world.
If the Szczerek incident demonstrates how quickly online outrage can escalate, the case of Gina Carano illustrates how it can reverberate for years to come.
The MMA fighter-turned-actress was fired from Disney's The Mandalorian in 2021 after making social media posts comparing the treatment of American conservatives to that of Jews in Nazi Germany. Her comments were widely criticised, sparking the trending hashtag #FireGinaCarano, leading her, you guessed it, to be fired by Disney from The Mandalorian.
Naturally, her comment is outlandish. But did she deserve work to be stolen from a Left righteous mob (my personal take: ignorant righteousness is as bad an evil as any)? Most certainly not.
Especially when she is a talented, hardworking, and by all accounts a pleasant actor to work with. I've loved Carano since her brilliant action performance in 2011's Haywire and think she never got her due in a then patriarchal, and now wokextremist Hollywood.
But this became a habit with Disney: demonstrative and performative righteousness. Earlier, they fired director James Gunn, who loved to provoke with edgy tweets that could be considered offensive and over the top out of context. Supporting Disney's decision to fire him was a digital mob with pitchforks and torches ready to digitally lynch anyone they felt had stepped even a toe out of the hard line they had drawn.
Disney's spineless behaviour in the name of righteousness later became one of the strongest pillars for the resurgence of the MAGA movement that is targeting anything they see as 'woke' or liberal, thus reshaping not just America, but the world.
What happened to Karla Sofía Gascón is a particularly complex take on this cancel culture. In 2025, Gascón made history as the first openly transgender actor to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress for her role in Emilia Pérez. What should have been a celebration of a personal milestone for Gascón and for representation in Hollywood turned into a nightmare when old offensive tweets resurfaced, including posts that vilified Muslims, attacked China in the context of COVID-19, and called George Floyd a "drug addicted swindler". The backlash that followed proved damaging not just to her personally, but also to the film, which, before this controversy, had garnered 13 Oscar nominations and was on track to win many, but ultimately managed to win only two, purportedly due to this controversy.
What gets lost in these wars waged by self-righteous—mostly Left-leaning mobs so far, with the Right catching up quickly—is the fundamental truth of filmmaking: movies are collaborative works that involve hundreds (often thousands) of talented people working toward a shared creative vision.
When one person's past actions trigger a backlash and harm the film’s chances at the box office or at the award circuit, it harms everyone who has invested their time and talent in the movie. A few tweets from one person that leads others to harm thousands: Where's the justice in that?
Both sides of the political spectrum engage in cancel culture, though both target different types of 'offences' and use different justifications. The Left movements tend to be "movements of aspiration" focused on achieving constructive goals, such as expanded rights or protections. Movements of the Right, meanwhile, tend to be "movements of opposition": defiant resistance to changes in social norms or political structures, like trying to cancel Disney itself for its propensity to bow to the Left's demand for cancellations of artists. The commonality: both can engage in cancel culture tactics when they perceive their values as being threatened, and often – in my view at least – the punishment is far greater than the crime; and this isn't even asking who made this mob arbiter of truth and justice?
The other similarity across the spectrum is the mechanisms of outrage: identify an offence, amplify it through sympathetic networks, apply pressure to institutions associated with the offender, and demand consequences. The content differs, but the tactics mirror each other strikingly. The result: every one of us is potentially just a single misstep away from controversy, and loss of livelihood and reputation, regardless of our political alignment, because the pattern of rapid condemnation and consequences is the same.
The irony lost in this is that while the Left generally demands that the world be kinder, more tolerant towards the other, and that people hear more before, they abandon these principles the moment they find a target to lynch, their digital mob speaking with one voice, enjoying this behti ganga mein haath dhona i.e. borrowing a pitchfork to participate in a lynching.
Mohandas Gandhi said: Hate the sin, not the sinner. That was the motto of those who participated in what is undoubtedly the largest activist movement the world has ever seen: the Indian freedom movement. But today, the digital activists of both the Right and Left seem to follow the mantra from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: "When you have to shoot, shoot. Don't talk." Who cares about truth, nuance, fairness, justice, and due process when you can be judge, jury and executioner?
Yet the collateral damage of these campaigns extends beyond the immediate targets to affect colleagues, projects, and families who had no part in the offensive behaviour, like the rest of the cast and crew of Emilia Pérez. Thousands of creative hours and a lifetime of artistry can be drowned by the historical actions of one person, raising legitimate questions about proportionality and collective punishment. Vigilante justice sounds good in movies; in real life, it leads to an endless cycle of pain and hurt.
As a society, we're still navigating how to balance accountability with forgiveness, and how to distinguish between genuine harm and mere offence. The solution isn't to abandon call-out culture entirely, but to refine it into something more nuanced; perhaps a sort of call-in culture that allows for growth, recognises complexity, and remembers that behind every trending hashtag are real human beings capable of both harm and hurt, as well as genuine personal change.
In the end, perhaps we should stop wishing for a digital public square that resembles a gladiatorial arena, settling in more for a classroom vibe where we can teach, where those who have committed offences can learn from mistakes rather than be punished for it without a hearing, and where we recognise that almost everyone is capable of both ignorance and growth. After all, as the case of James Gunn shows, today's cancellation victim might be tomorrow's studio head (thanks to that cancellation, he ended up heading Disney rival DC), and today's outraged activist might be tomorrow's cancelled celebrity.
Least you think: "Surely, not me;" remember that "Anyone, at any time, may equally find himself victim or executioner." Jean-Paul Sartre might have said it in a preface to La Question (The Question) by Henri Alleg, a harrowing account of torture during the Algerian War; it could equally be applied to the torture of digital war by its self-appointed priests.