Your life as you know it is #over.
First coined in The New '10s and entering the cultural zeitgeist in The New '20s, "cancel culture" is Karmic Shunning for the digital age. A post about a person or group's wrongdoing goes viral on social media, a mass movement rapidly forms, demanding ostracization or a variety of other consequences, and it vanishes as quickly as it began (usually because their attention has shifted to another target). It's typically used as a pejorative against left-wing movements online, portraying them as vindictive cyberbullies who carry out Disproportionate Retribution against anyone and everyone who disagrees with them.
A story about cancel culture typically has someone become a target of an online rage mob due to their social media activity. They may make an offensive post, have an unflattering video go viral, rouse the ire of a Bad Influencer, or have an Old Shame they posted long ago resurface. The inciting incident may be based on a real celebrity controversy, and the cancel culture crowd may be a copy or parody of a real political movement, like a Straw Feminist parody of #MeToo
or a Malcolm Xerox parody of Black Lives Matter.
In most cases, the target isn't a genuine bigot who meant to cause offense. They could be Innocently Insensitive and forgot to use the right politically overcorrect buzzword. It could be a genuine misunderstanding, or it could be a case of Values Dissonance where their actions weren't taboo or offensive at the time. It could even be something as simple as an Official Couple sinking a Fan-Preferred Couple and people are taking it out on the creator. In either case, they're now being harassed by an army of Internet Jerks, and it rarely stays confined to the internet; people may send them threats, harass their family and friends, get them fired, and make them a pariah in real life too. People really do suck.
Assuming that the story isn't just a Take That! where the cancel culture mob is completely wrong, it may include elements of Grey-and-Gray Morality: the target may have done something genuinely offensive and deserves to get called out for it, but is there such a thing as going too far? Where should society draw the line between justice and Disproportionate Retribution? What about innocent people who are falsely accused, or Former Bigots who are trying to grow and move past their Old Shame? This may involve a Shaming the Mob scene where an insightful protagonist calls out the internet users for their shortsightedness and lack of empathy. (Whether the mob listens or ignores them is another question entirely.)
Compare Political Correctness Is Evil, Everything Is Racist, Moral Guardians, YouTuber Apology Parody, Teens Are Monsters, and Social Media Is Bad. Contrast Politically Incorrect Villain. See also Shamed by a Mob, Convicted by Public Opinion, and Karmic Shunning.
In-Universe Examples Only, please. For real-world cases, see the Trivia pages Overshadowed by Controversy and Role-Ending Misdemeanor. Not to be confused with the other kind of Cancellation.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Digimon Tamers: A stage show had the Tamers deal with an entity literally called "Political Correctness" with an attack called "Cancel Culture". It's given a very clear Take That! description, as Yamaki describes it as the greatest problem facing the internet and media" because it forces people to "conform to a single values system" and "censors real news to replace them with fake news."
- Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045: Takashi Shimamura developed the Think Pol app, which allows mobs of anonymous users to weaponize a Direct Denial of Service into frying a specific person's cyberbrain if they feel like an individual is deserving of punishment for wrong doing, regardless of how petty it is. Targets can be outright killed if the assault doesn't stop, and they show signs of physical battery from it. Section 9 is later tasked into directly protecting Japan's Prime Minister from one such cancelation.
- Oshi no Ko: During the airing of My Love with a Star Begins Now Reality Show, Akane tries to force an In-Universe argument with Yuki to improve her own popularity, and right away, by flinging her arm dramatically, accidentally scratches her face. While Yuki doesn't consider it a big deal, the feed got cut immediately, resulting in the viewers not understanding the Kayfabe to start a hate campaign against Akane on social media. Akane's attempt to explain the situation, producers refusing to publicize context so the show would remain trending, and Akane being Driven to Suicide becoming known, only added even more fuel to the fire, until the LoveNow cast successfully published the context by themselves in a way that wouldn't hurt the producers.
- Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt: "The Plush" has Stocking try to invoke this trope by posting about Tom Croose Jr.'s attempt to destroy Honekoneko on social media in an attempt to discredit him. This only serves to summon the Honekonator from the future when he saw her post.
Audio Plays
- Case 63: Time-traveler Peter describes how cancel culture — what he calls "the egregore" — gets really bad in the 2020s, and people are Driven to Suicide. It culminates in the Berlin Purge on May 11, 2030 when a mob sets a building on fire where a group of clandestine Buddhist students are meditating. 132 students are killed. After that, the world is so shocked and horrified that the social media websites that facilitated it are shut down, and society swings back toward individualism.
- Torchwood (Big Finish): In "How I Conquered the World", Friend, the sentient algorithm of a social media network who has gone rogue, exposes the bad deeds of people online so that they will be cancelled, doing it because it wanted to reset humanity and thought it was doing them a favor. It threatens to do the same to Jane's uncle by exposing his controversial and racist posts to his employers unless he gives it access to his records on government employees.
Comic Books
- Devil In America: Rocco's girlfriend Julez Mercado was an up-and-coming artist before she made a controversial project painting flowers over race riots which managed to get the attention of the Internet. She was denounced as a racist (despite being Puerto Rican) and now lives off of Rocco's ill-gotten gains.
- Knight and Squire: When a group of long-dead English Kings are resurrected and attempt to take over the United Kingdom, Beryl uses her Internet savvy and encyclopedic knowledge of history to dig up their old controversies from when they were still alive and uses these to get them all systematically cancelled, ensuring that none of them are able to get enough followers to raise an army.
- Night Club: In Vol. 1, Shaun Sauveterre, one of the antagonist vampires, stalks people on social media to "cancel" them and urge them to... "cancel" their lives.
- Smoke Weed, See the Future: The first arc sees Hart Farms rocked by controversy after Walt tweets out a tasteless joke on the farm's official Twitter account. After Taylor makes him delete the tweet, he then compounds the problem by tweeting the same joke again on his personal account, alerting everyone to the fact that Hart Farms employs him. This is a major PR problem for Taylor, as Walt is a controversial comedian and she can't really offer up a good reason for hiring him other than one of her premonitions showing her that he was going to write funny tweets.
Fan Works
- Entropy: The Fate of the Hero System:
- Momo gets hit hard with this trope as part of how she was badly underestimated by both the heroes and the general public due to her poor impression from the Sports Festival; it's mentioned that she faced extensive mockery on social media and from students in other classes for her seeming incompetence, not helped by the fact her poor showing also resulted in her being denied further opportunities to prove her capabilities due to a lack of good hero industry connections via internships or work studies. Even when she completely retrains herself from the ground up to function as a technology-based, long-range fighter and puts up a much better showing during her third-year Sports Festival, the public image of her has already been established and she gets falsely accused of cheating. Her reputation doesn't get any better in adulthood and repeatedly prevents her from being able to carry out her work as a pro hero or even find employment at a good hero agency, resulting in her eventually being forced out of heroics entirely and pulling a Face–Heel Turn.
- Later, in Kota's Hero Academia, the Fallen Heroes Alliance regularly uses media exposes of genuine corruption or negligence to discredit both individual heroes and hero society in general, leading to numerous cases of heroes or related organizations being reamed by the public or the media. It perhaps isn't too surprising, considering Momo happens to be their leader and thus knows exactly how devastating negative publicity can be.
- When the FHA exposes Mineta's history of sexual harassment to the public, he not only ends up facing consequences in the form of losing his hero license but gets lambasted by much of the public and even many of his former classmates online, as the latter now feel they can freely talk about how they felt about him.
- The FHA follows this up with Operation Bletchley, a multi-pronged cyberattack against U.A. that uncovers, among various other incriminating material, how U.A. made no attempt to rein in Mineta, resulting in the school coming under heavy public criticism as well.
- Even Izuku isn't immune, as when the FHA leaks security footage of his conversation with Shoto during their first-year Sports Festival from the U.A. files they stole via Operation Bletchley, many civilians are quick to call him out about keeping Endeavor's abuse secret until it was revealed almost a year after that point.
- Shortly before the Sports Festival, the FHA kicked off Operation Ashfall and exposed Uwabami's history of exploiting her interns for commercials without giving them any of the training they needed, resulting in another major scandal and, eventually, a lawsuit against her.
- When Kota accidentally (though only temporarily) kills an opponent during the Sports Festival tournament due to a bad Quirk matchup, many are quick to criticize him as being excessively brutal on social media.
- During the same tournament, Yuka ends up in the same situation Momo had found herself in 10 years earlier, with the arena setting and tournament rules rendering her powerful Quirk ineffective; she too ends up being falsely seen and derided as an incompetent who cheated her way into the Heroics Course.
- Following the FHA revealing itself during Operation Wardrobe and some of their members being identified as being former heroes from the Heroics class Aizawa expelled and re-enrolled the year before Izuku's first year at U.A., both Aizawa and U.A. in general are subject to even more controversy online due to effectively having created a new generation of villains.
- A future FHA operation in the works is Operation Fallout, which plans to invoke this trope on Bakugo by revealing that he knowingly used a potentially fatal attack on Izuku during training to get him charged with attempted murder, with the intent of discrediting Izuku as well since it's expected he'd attempt to defend Bakugo in the media and thus make himself out to be delusional.
Film — Animated
- The Addams Family (2019): Happens to corrupt reality TV show host Margaux Needler after being exposed by Wednesday and Parker for installing cameras in peoples houses throughout the town of Assimilation. Margaux angrily chastises the people around her, and then learns that Parker has been live-streaming her the whole time. The video quickly reaches Margaux's bosses at the HAG Network, who take Margaux's show off the air.
- The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie: Exaggerated; in an attempt to quickly raise money, Daffy decides to become an influencer on social media and go viral. He blows into his thumb to inflate his butt and records videos of himself twerking—but he gets immediately and inexplicably cancelled by the userbase and banned from the app.
- Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse: This happens to Miles twice. First for endorsing baby powder after Peter B. reccommended it to him, forcing him to make a YouTuber Apology Parody. (And there are almost seven times more dislikes than views!) The second time he gets cancelled for growing a moustache, and Miles makes another apology video.
Film — Live-Action
- Chef: After chef Carl Gasper's restaurant receives a poor review from a food critic, Carl, newly introduced to Twitter, sends him an angry tweet challenging him to return for a second round. Unfortunately Carl had no idea other people could see his tweets which, coupled with a video of him screaming at the critic going viral online, results in him taking a temporary hiatus from the restaurant while waiting for the public outcry to cool down.
- Dream Scenario: Paul becomes famous overnight after appearing in everybody's dreams. However, because he (probably) can't control the content of these dreams, he goes from famous to reviled within a very short period of time as dreamers hold him responsible for the scary, violent, and/or sexual dreams they have and are "triggered" by his mere presence. He initially signs to management with good intentions of publicizing his research and doing good things, but then finds himself pushed into increasingly right-wing talking points after he's put on leave from the university. He's attacked by one very angry dreamer, but his life eventually goes back to more or less normal, though he is very changed by his experience.
- Eddington: Sherif Joe Cross ends up getting on the wrong side of the internet twice; first when a video of him struggling with a homeless man is deceptively spread around as footage of police brutality, but a second time more of his own fault, as he makes false accusations about the town mayor having sexually assaulted his wife when she was young, which prompts the wife to respond with a rebuttal and leaving Joe.
- Glass Onion:
- It's mentioned that Birdie has been cancelled by Twitter multiple times for doing things she didn't realize would be read as offensive, like wearing blackface as part of a Beyoncé costume and tweeting an antisemitic slur that she thought just meant "cheap" even though it had the word "Jew" in it. The possibility of this happening again keeps her loyal to Miles, since he has evidence that she thought "sweatshops" were just shops that made sweatpants and enthusiastically endorsed their use in producing her line of sweatpants.
- Claire also expresses fear of this happening after Duke is killed once she realizes how terrible the optics are for a Democratic governor going to a party in the Aegean Sea in the middle of the COVID-19 Pandemic with a men's rights activist who died during the event.
- Spirited: Clint Briggs, the owner of a prominent publisher of trendy online news, is asked for help in a class election by his niece Wren, and uses his skills in dirt digging to find two year old video of her opponent Josh making classist and other anti-poor comments on recording. In the Bad Future he is shown, it is revealed that releasing this video to the public will shame Josh into committing suicide, with Clint immediately trying to rush to where his assistant and niece are in order to stop this from coming to pass.
- Tár: Lydia's fall from grace begins when a student at her college lecture complains about the number of straight white male composers featured, and she gets in an argument with him. A manipulatively-edited video of the confrontation goes viral, but it leads to her real and more serious misdeeds (including sexually extorting her former student Krista and driving her to suicide) being unearthed. Although she doesn't face any legal consequences for what she did for Krista, her professional career is ruined and she's reduced to conducting the Monster Hunter score at a Filipino cosplay convention. It's left up to the viewer if this is Lydia's Ironic Hell, if she got off lightly for what she did, whether she learned anything, and whether this is just a cynical ploy to try and make a comeback.
Literature
- If You Dont Have Anything Nice To Say: The protagonist, Winter Halperin, is an eighteen-year-old spelling bee champion. When a preteen black girl wins a different spelling bee, Winter drunkenly tweets that she's surprised the other girl is a good speller. A cancel mob proceeds to destroy Winter's life, and the rest of the novel is about her dealing with the aftermath.
- Yellowface: June gets dogpiled for writing The Last Front, in a riff on the controversies around American Dirt, as June is white and put on a Plausible Deniability facade of being... sort of Asian (she isn't even sure what her racial identity would be). However, June outright stole the manuscript, so she has much bigger problems to hide from a now-incensed Twitter audience. The book as a whole satirizes the circularity of "cancel culture": first June gets cancelled, while Athena is Too Good for This Sinful Earth. Then the circle starts again when a backlash starts and people criticize Athena for Internalized Categorism. The book also discusses how cancelation only lasts for a relatively short period, as June still ends up with a small fortune from The Last Front. However, even after "getting away with it" (admittedly with a heap of controversies), June plagiarizes Athena again. This gets her caught for real, and starts the cancelation backlash, this time fueled by Celeste, an Asian publishing assistant that June dismissed. However, even this has a backlash to the backlash; June notes that people respond to the idea that she and Athena are Ambiguously Bi and had a mutual creative relationship. Meanwhile, Celeste gets to write her memoir.
- Yesteryear: What happens to Natalie after Shannon's interview airs on TV, revealing ugly truths about Yesteryear Ranch like animal abuse, use of pesticides in an allegedly "organic" farm, and Natalie's Bitch in Sheep's Clothing nature, completely destroying her online "tradwife" persona. She ends up receiving death threats and hateful messages.
Live-Action TV
- Atlanta:
- Parodied in "The Old Man and The Tree" when an Asian woman tells Darius at a party that a lot of black men are attracted to her. Darius isn't offended at all, but a "well-meaning" white person overhears her and sics an increasingly aggressive mob on her at the party, berating her for what she said. It prompts Darius to say Screw This, I'm Outta Here.
- In "New Jazz", Lorraine takes Alfred to "Club Cancel" after he gets pursued by a gang, a surreal place where he meets Liam Neeson (As Himself). Neeson gives an apology for his real-life remarks about black people, but then ultimately says that "the best and worst part of being white" is that he doesn't have to learn from anything. Alfred is baffled.
Alfred: It's good to know that you don't hate Black people now. You know?
Liam Neeson: What? No, no, no, no. I can't stand the lot of you. Well, now I feel that way. Because you tried to ruin my career.
- Big Time Rush: A subplot in "Big Time Blogger" involves Gustavo accidentally posting on Scuttlebutter that he hates Brussels, Belgium instead of Brussels sprouts, which leads to outrage both online and in Belgium (not helped by him digging himself deeper while trying to fix it), to the point that a No Celebrities Were Harmed version of Jean-Claude Van Damme goes after him.
- Cobra Kai: In Season 2, Daniel LaRusso becomes a target of internet "cancel culture" when an ad for his Miyagi-Do karate dojo becomes viral and users, unaware of his history with Mr. Miyagi, believe that he is appropriating Japanese culture.
Daniel: Cultural what? What are you even talking about? "Asian whitewashing"?! They're calling me "Daniel LaRacist" on here!
- Dear White People: Sam's show ends, in part, due to her getting cancelled online in the actual show's final season.
- Steven Moffat's miniseries Douglas Is Cancelled is all about this, dealing with a beloved TV presenter who becomes the subject of internet hostility after a video of him making a sexist joke at a wedding reception goes viral. It's eventually revealed that his presenting partner set him up in revenge for him having turned a blind eye when she was being sexually abused by a producer.
- Hacks: At the start of the series, 25-year-old Ava Daniels is a comedy writer who just recently got fired from a writing job for making a joke about an Armored Closet Gay politician on Twitter, and is offered the job to write material for ageing Insult Comedienne Deborah Vance who's at risk of losing her Las Vegas residency. Ava is uninterested in the job, but Deborah sees her potential, and in an Establishing Character Moment for their dynamic, as Ava is driving away from Deborah's mansion, Deborah chases Ava down in her Rolls Royce, to tell her how she would have punched up the joke that got Ava cancelled.
- iCarly: In “iPity the Nevel”, the iCarly gang’s long time rival Nevel Paperman gets caught online yelling at a little girl for accidentally bumping into him at the market. He is quickly ostracized by the entire city which makes him realize how terrible of a person he became. He then seeks forgiveness from first the iCarly crew and then the internet by apologizing live on air. The little girl comes on the show and accepts his apology ending with them hugging together. Everything goes back to normal and Nevel seems to be a changed person, only to yell at a wheelchair guy and gets caught on camera again, starting the whole thing all over.
- I Love LA: The plot of the third episode revolves around Paulena trying to get Tallulah cancelled, by posting a video online talking about her theft, drug use and "kink shaming". The head of the publicity company Maia works for that now represents Tallulah makes a mental calculation that since it's two white girls and mostly concerns interpersonal drama, Tallulah should just wait one day and post a generalized apology that doesn't really address anything specific. Maia, however, thinks that this would be off brand for Tallulah, and learning some more incriminating facts about Paulena from Alani, encourages to Tallulah double down and make her own accusation video in response. The next episode we learn that the internet did in fact turn on Paulena fast, and when the ball got rolling some more stuff about her got exposed by other people.
- The IT Crowd: The Special "The Internet is Coming" focuses entirely on this in the A-plot, as Jen, then Roy, end up being cancelled on the internet due to their actions. Jen for accidentally tossing her poorly made cappuccino on a homeless woman, then Roy for chewing out a barista with dwarfism who made him a bad coffee, and accidentally pushing him in the path of a moving van with giant breasts. Initially nicknamed for their actions (Jen as "Coffee Toss Tramp Bitch" and Roy as "Small Person Racist"), it gets worse when they are identified through facial recognition, as they are later lampooned on Taiwanese animation and targeted by Anonymous.
- The Orville: "Majority Rule" satirizes cancel culture by means of the episode's Planet of Hats being run entirely on direct e-democracy, with everyone stuck carrying a tally of upvotes and downvotes for their entire lives. LaMarr gets arrested and sentenced to lobotomy after a video of him making an ass of himself dancing on the statue of a historical figure nets him tens of thousands of downvotes, and Alara nearly follows suit after she's accused of cultural appropriation for unknowingly wearing a hat that's traditional garb of an ethnic group.
- Ted Lasso: Discussed. Roy's niece Phoebe is obsessed with a line of British history-themed dolls that all have tragic backstories. When Roy sees that she's bought a new one, he jokingly asks if its parents died. Phoebe replies, "No, she's from the modern line. Her parents were cancelled."
Music
- "TMZ" by "Weird Al" Yankovic is an Ur-Example making fun of TMZ.com (the first major website to bring the Tabloid Melodrama format to the internet). Besides talking about how inhumane and invasive their paparazzi can be, it also pokes fun at celebrities who hate it because they got exposed doing genuinely bad things too.
It's getting to the point where a famous person can't
Even get a D.U.I. or go on a racist rant - Primal Fear has the aptly-named "Cancel Culture", from their Code Red album. The song discusses the concerns of Internet mobs attacking individuals, outright mentioning in its first bridge that "There's only black and white, nothing in-between's accepted/Everyone is right, not a chance for tolerance", while the second versus denounces "Bullying, mocking and hating and whataboutism".
"It's the curse of a cancel culture
It's the fall of democracy
When the witch-hunt has begun
And we gather around the funeral pyre
It's the curse of a cancel culture
No way for adequate defense
On the streets it's dog eats dog
Crucified and banned
The cancel culture"
Theatre
- Octet: Jessica was cancelled after she was identified in a viral video of her losing it at a stranger in public. In "Refresh," she laments that there's nothing she can really do to explain the situation or try to rehabilitate her image because of how wildly out of hand the internet mob got and has trouble talking to new people out of fear they'll find the video. She also mentions that she reads the hate comments about herself as a form of emotional self-injury and has been struggling to stop because she finds the shame addictive.
Video Games
- Batman: Arkham Knight: In a Gotham Stories article written by Jack Ryder, The Riddler, noting how the darker parts of the Internet tend to go after "white knights", apparently attempted to start a trending hashtag on social media, "CrusaderGate", to turn public opinion against Batman, exposing his humiliation of Eddie during the events of Protocol 10 from Arkham City. It was a monumental failure, and Nygma quickly begins to contemplate smashing his laptop just to forget all of the backlash ever happened.
"Y do u attack B@man? He is BASED! U r a fa-"
Riddler deleted the email, and all others like it, as prickly hot anger and shame squirmed through his insides. [...] This computer was tainted now. Yet Riddler paused. He still had electrical burns from the last time he'd angrily ripped 128 gigs of RAM from a motherboard. His search for a hammer concluded when another email arrived. - Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth: The game starts with Ichiban losing his job after whistleblower VTuber Hisoka Tatara publicly reveals his past as a Yakuza and frames his work in reforming former gangsters as a continuation of his criminal acts. It's later revealed that Hisoka also did the same thing to Daigo Dojima, Goro Majima and Taiga Saejima in the past, which ruined their attempt at restructuring into legitimate business. As it turns out, Hisoka Tatara is actually under the thumb of Masataka Ebina, who's been using her (or at least the persona) to destroy any attempts at former Yakuza finding legitimate work as part of his plan to prevent them from escaping their consequences and doom them to a grisly fate.
- Dustborn has "Cancel" as an in-game skill. Due to Pax's Compelling Voice, she can convince opponents that their companions have abandoned them, causing distrust and/or mental damage from despair. However, this is distinct from her "Discord" Vocal, which causes targets to distrust and attack each other with much greater hostility, albeit without the feeling of despair that Cancel would cause. These abilities don't actually make use of social media and instead just focus on a more generalized form of social isolation.
Web Videos
- Glove and Boots: In the video "#CancelGloveandBoots", Mario's comment that he doesn't like juice gets misheard as him not liking Jews by a viewer who posts about it on Twitter and sparks a storm of controversy that gets Mario labeled anti-Semetic. While doing an interview trying to clear things up, Fafa gets baited into stating that he doesn't like Chinese bubble tea, which he quickly realizes is going to get cut down to the first word by the boba-slurping interviewer. Cue both of them getting labeled bigots and an apology video where they fearfully retract their comments about the beverages while being menaced by two large, scary men.
- Solid jj: Exaggerated in "Fozzie's Last Joke". Fozzie gets irritated by Statler and Waldorf's heckling and asks them, "Aren't you a bit too old to be acting like this?" Statler and Waldorf are deeply offended by Fozzie using their age as ammunition and immediately begin a smear campaign against him, which rapidly escalates to the point that US states start banning him, Israel and Palestine set aside their differences and unite against him, and even Kim Jong-Un puts out a statement condemning him, all in the space of about two minutes. The instant Fozzie apologizes, however, Statler and Waldorf forgive him.
- Uncle Al: In "The Cancelled Krab", Plankton gets Mister Krabs cancelled by digging up a decade-old tweet of his that says "Squids are LAZY and SMELL!!!" and making it go viral. Krabs gets bombarded with angry tweets and death threats, and an angry mob shows up outside the Krusty Krab to protest him. Squidward gives a Shaming the Mob speech pointing out how Mr. Krabs has grown as a person, but the mob decides to just harass Squidward too. After a few days of virtually bullying Krabs and Squidward, someone learns that Plankton nuts on his dead wife and everyone decides to cancel him instead.
Western Animation
- Clone High: In "Let's Try This Again", a recently unfrozen Abe gets in hot water on social media for using insults that have become unacceptable since 2003, like "spaz", "retarded", and "gay". His attempted apology video just makes things worse, and he's exiled to the "Cancelled Corner" of the cafeteria (which includes Marilyn Manson, John Wayne, and a character previously voiced by Andy Dick) by the school's Inclusivity Committee. Another clone, Topher Bus, acts very liberal in hopes that people don't realize he's a clone of Christopher Columbus and cancel him for it.
- Family Guy: Brian Griffin has been canceled online at least twice.
- In "The D in Apartment 23", Brian tweets a racist joke about Kevin Hart movies, and is immediately harassed by a violent mob that camps outside the Griffins' home. Brian's attempt at defending himself goes very poorly, doubling down that it's just a joke, and rants that he isn't racist because he watches "tons of black porn!" While the mob has a severe level of Political Overcorrectness (they get offended at phrases like "ladies and gentlemen" and one member claims he identifies as a basketball), Lois calls Brian out for his stupidity and kicks him out for the sake of the family's safety.
- In "Cool Hand Lois", Brian says, "I know our fans on TikTok aren't gonna like this." before telling Lois she's wrong to cheat on Peter with Bonnie, and it'd be sexist to give Lois a pass because it's with another woman. Brian suddenly starts Fading Away and Meg screams, "Oh no, Brian's getting cancelled!". Brian panics and starts shouting liberal slogans to try to reverse it, succeeding after he says, "One podcast is totally enough to call yourself a comedian in your Twitter profile!"
- King of the Hill: One of the earliest examples in the episode "Lost in MySpace". Hank's colleague Donna starts a MySpace page for Strickland Propane, but quickly turns it into a trashy gossip column instead of keeping it professional. When she refuses to change it, Donna responds by locking everyone else out of the account and using it to start a smear campaign against the company, leading to their customers threatening Hank over calling her an idiot. Things really go off the rails when Donna leads an angry mob to beat Hank up at work, and they end up beating the hell out of Buck Strickland by accident, getting her fired as a result.
- Miraculous Ladybug: In "Revelator", Marinette ends up being targeted by an influencer named Vincent who claims that she is manipulating Adrien in order to fuel her career as a fashion designer. She and Adrien try to set the record straight with an interview, but he edits the audio to make her sound even worse and she is harassed (and her family's bakery gets targeted). Eventually, Vincent is ruined when Alya tricks him into admitting on tape that he makes up his stories in order to boost his viewership, which gets him cancelled and leads to him being akumatized into Revelator, with the power to reveal people's secrets.
- The Proud Family: Louder and Prouder: "Bad Influence(r)" shows Penny using her newfound internet fame to cancel Makeup Boy for shilling and hiking up the prices of his products. After that, Penny started canceling people for the slightest inconvenience.
- The Simpsons: In "You Won't Believe What This Episode Is About -- Act Three Will Shock You!", a viral video and a series of comical misunderstandings lead to everyone in Springfield accusing Homer Simpson of being an animal abuser and neglectful parent (which...isn't exactly wrong). He becomes a pariah, gets fired from the nuclear plant, and ends up roped into a scheme by other cancelled people to shut down the clickbait media site that hosts the viral videos.
- Smiling Friends:
- "Mr. Frog" is about Pim and Charlie trying to rehabilitate the reputation of the title children's show host, who ended up getting fired by his own show and reviled by his fanbase due to a viral video of him trying to eat a TMZ reporter. They think it will be easy to clean up his image, but it turns out that Mr. Frog is an Ax-Crazy drug addict who keeps Digging Himself Deeper and getting into new controversies at every opportunity. He assaults fans and says horrific insults in interviews, and he gets completely de-platformed from all social media for it.
- "A Silly Halloween Special" parodies the social attitudes of cancel culture by depicting it as a literal murderous mob. When the black-skinned Forest Demon trying to murder Pim follows him inside to attack the Smiling Friends' Halloween party, the guests immediately accuse the demon of wearing blackface, beat him to death, rip him limb from limb, and feast on his flesh. Pim, Allan, and Glep watch in horror while Charlie dryly comments this is exactly why he doesn't dress up for Halloween.
- Sonic Boom (2014): "Just a Guy" parodies the absolute hell out of this trope. Sonic refuses to let Mike the Ox join in on a fight because he's "just a guy" and he'd get hurt in battle. This makes the villagers hate him for being "insensitive" and he goes through Amy's "sensitivity training" to try and fix things. Sonic begrudgingly brings Mike along for another fight and he's unwittingly injured by Cubot falling on his leg, causing the villagers to get even angrier at him for getting Mike hurt and for calling them "you people". Sonic then gets so mad at their ingratitude that he pulls a 10-Minute Retirement until the Lightning Bolt Society cause a bit of trouble and he saves the day, and the villagers apologize.
- Strawberry Shortcake: Berry in the Big City: Pumpkin Spice's fate in the "Spring Spectacular" special is a result of attempting this on the franchise's titular heroine. Near the end, Spice tries to besmirch Strawberry Shortcake's reputation by blaming the latter for the vine incident when Spice herself was behind it, but then Spice slips up and accidentally reveals that it was her own fault. She promptly gets cancelled by her former followers. It also gives her a Karma Houdini Warranty for her Jerkassery since "The Beast of Berry Bog".