END CANCEL CULTURE 2020

The Problem

The goal of our project is to change the way people view cancel culture as we believe it is a negative force on society. We aim to promote change in the way that people behave both online and offline. We hope that by providing insights into the impact that cancel culture can have on mental health, job prospects and overall well-being, (as well as urging individuals to take caution when having an online presence) we will be able to limit the overall impact that cancel culture can have at both an individual and societal level, particularly in relation to cyberbullying.

Why Is It A Problem?

Cancel culture and cyberbullying are a prevalent problem, the National i-Safe Survey found that 57% of students report receiving hurtful comments online (National i-Safe Survey, 2004). 20% of youths have avoided school because they are afraid of cyberbullying (Bullying UK). There are potential consequences for perpetrators and victims such as depression (Wang, Nasel, Iannotti, 2011) and suicide ideation (Hinduja & Patchin, 2010). While wide programs have been implemented to decrease bullying in schools and workplaces, similar policies are rarely created to address cyberbullying (Agatston, Kowalski & Limber, 2007). Additionally, perpetrators of cyberbullying face serious consequences. Writing a message with aims to cause distress can lead to up to 6 months in prison or a £5000 fine. A lot of people are unaware of these consequences. Part of the problem is generally a lack of knowledge of the effects of cyberbullying on perpetrators and victims, even though they are so severe. Furthermore, internet platforms where bullying can occur such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter rarely take responsibility or implement campaigns to reduce cyberbullying other than small report buttons. Therefore, it is important to encourage individuals to take a stand against cyberbullying.

Target Audience

The intervention will take place largely on social media as it is where most of cancel culture occurs, therefore, our target audience is social media users. Frequent social media users are likely to be the most aware of cancel culture and thus the most responsive to the intervention. The aim of our intervention is to reduce cyberbullying, harassment, and other negative behaviours associated with cancel culture. To accomplish this, we first need to draw attention to the problem. This will be done by posting memes on Instagram, a popular social media platform (Knight-McCord et al., 2016). Data shows that young adults use Instagram the most out of all online adult users (Greenwood, Perrin, & Duggan, 2016). Memes are commonly created, viewed, and shared by young adult social media users and so should be an effective method of engaging our target audience. Memes often carry a concise message that does not require complex cognitive processing. This is suitable for most social media platforms as users may not want to commit their attention to something effortful as they are scrolling. We hope the memes will attract attention to our Instagram account which provides a link to a cyberbullying charity. Posting a direct link to the charity’s donation page to our Instagram account ensures accessibility so users will not get discouraged by the effort otherwise needed to search for charities themselves.

The Intervention

Instagram and Memes

The main platform for the intervention was Instagram, one of the most popular social media websites (Greenwood, Perrin, & Duggan, 2016). This is because cancel culture and cyberbullying take place largely on social media. It is also an effective way to reach our target audience: social media users. Additionally, Instagram is an ideal place to post memes as most of the content consists of visual media, such as pictures and videos. We started by posting memes about cancel culture. This was to induce a light-hearted atmosphere associated with our account through use of humour. Memes also prevent intimidating the audience by talking about an intense subject immediately, preventing emotional burnout or ‘compassion fatigue’ (Kinnick, Krugman, & Cameron, 1996). Compassion fatigue refers to the desensitisation to social problems following several encounters with the trauma of others. Instilling a sense of playfulness in our audience should hopefully lead to positive associations with our account, making it easier to acquire and maintain attention. Further, we hope that memes encourage open-mindedness when approaching the topic of cyberbullying so they will consider our message and appeals more thoughtfully, and thus would be susceptible to our attempts at behaviour change later, such as signing our petition or contributing a donation.

Banners and Infographics

Soon after memes, we added banners about cyber positivity. The banners outline actions related to cyber positivity to make the internet a safe space. For example, it mentions reporting hateful posts which could encourage others to be more active when they witness cyber-bullying, possibly by talking to the perpetrator directly, contacting the appropriate authorities, or even by simply promoting positivity to combat negativity. We encouraged viewers to re-post the banners onto their social media, making a public commitment to cyber positivity in the process. By re-posting the banners on their own social media accounts, we relied on the audience’s desire for self-consistency. This should have motivated them to consider their actions so that they are in line with cyber positivity. Another benefit of re-posting the banners is that it increases the scope of people who might view, share, and commit to the values of cyber positivity. This means that we can reach members of the audience even if they do not see our Instagram page. We also posted an infographic. The infographic’s purpose was to explain why cyberbullying is a pertinent issue by informing our audience about the effects of cyberbullying. Particularly, the infographic focuses on cyberbullying’s effect on mental health. In other words, the infographic uses information to make the impact of cyberbullying less abstract. The use of statistics in the infographic also shows the extent of damage which helps our audience understand the widespread impact of cyberbullying.

Current Events

Amid the memes, infographics, and banners, we also shared a headline about the untimely death of UK TV presenter Caroline Flack. Flack’s death was caused by suicide and occurred following weeks of receiving negative messages via the internet, primarily through social media platforms such as Twitter. Among the negative comments, Flack was also declared “cancelled”, a statement often used to demonstrate a social media user’s intent to boycott an individual they do not like. In the days following people expressed their condolences while citing the hateful messages targeted towards Flack as a leading contributor of her suicide. The quality of social media has been associated with profound effects on mental health (Davila, Hershenberg, Feinstein, Gorman, Bhatia, & Starr, 2012), uch that repeated exposure to the negative aspects of social media, such as hate messages, can lead to poor mental health. Flack’s death demonstrates how severe the effects of cancel culture and cyberbullying can be and is a reminder to practice cyber positivity to prevent similar cases arising. We hope that Caroline Flack’s death reminds our audience of the importance of their behaviour online and why they need to practice making the internet a safe space sooner rather than later.

Petitions and Charity Donations

We wanted to ensure our audience would consider their actions more carefully when using social media to limit events that cultivate cancel culture. It is important that our audience practice cyber positivity consistently to minimise the effects of cyberbullying as much as possible as not much is needed to negatively impact mental health. To achieve this, we encouraged people to sign our petition which was posted on our Instagram page. Like our Instagram page the petition includes a description of the cause we are promoting, outlines our stance on cancel culture, and states our aspirational outcomes. We had hoped that by signing the petition people would be more critical of how they use social media and their impact on others. The petition site utilises public commitment by publishing the names of those who have signed it, motivating signers to practice cyber civility. Our goal for our petition was 1000 signatures. Achieving this goal would send the message that cancel culture is a serious issue that requires urgent action to reduce its impact. Even if people did not sign the petition, seeing how many others did should still inspire them to consider their behaviour on social media and where it fits in within the climate of cancel culture and cyberbullying. Commitment is also induced by requesting donations to the charity ‘Ditch the Label’ using a link to a Just Giving page which was added to our Instagram’s biography. The charity directly combats cyberbullying by providing advice and resources to help victims of bullying, supporting research on bullying dynamics, and campaigning (e.g. with celebrity band ‘Little Mix’ and company ‘Simple’). By donating to Ditch the Label, people are taking direct action to make social media and similar platforms a safe space. Our goal donation amount was £100.

Persuasive Techniques

Foot-in-the-door

The main persuasive technique that we used was the foot-in-the-door technique (FITD). This technique asks individuals to conduct a low commitment preparatory action before asking them to conduct the more difficult expected behaviour (Freedman & Fraser, 1966). In our project the expected behaviour was donating to a Just Giving page supporting Ditch the Label and implementing positive cyber-behaviours (e.g. reporting negative comments, not posting hurtful comments). The preparatory action was engaging with our social media pages and signing the #BeKind petition. FITD is often attributed to Freedman and Fraser, who found that participants were four times more likely to agree to a road sign in their backyard if they had earlier agreed to a sign in their window about safe driving.

FITD has been explained using Bem’s self-perception theory – the preparatory action becomes linked to the individual's identity. In decision making processes individuals look to their past behaviour to identify beliefs on that certain topic. Salient and recent behaviours therefore, are indicators of attitudes (Burger, 1999). Preparatory behaviours convince people that the attitude is relevant to them and to avoid cognitive discomfort, future behaviours must be consistent with this behaviour. Frameworks like MINDSPACE recognise commitment and consistency as persuasive techniques because individuals strive to match their self-identities and prior behaviours.

Research, however (Dillard, Hunter & Burgoon, 1984), suggests that FITD is weak and therefore not an effective persuasive technique. A more recent meta-analysis (Burger, 1999) has contradicted these findings and multiple studies show that FITD is effective in promoting Eco citizenship (Joule, Bernard & Halimi-Falkowicz, 2008). More relevant to our current approach are studies that have used FITD to increase donations (Pliner, Hart, Kohl, & Saari, 1974). Asking people to sign petitions or wearing buttons displaying their public commitment increased the probability of future donations to the campaign. We hope that people share our posters stating that they are committed to cyber positivity, like the pin technique Pliner et al. (1974) used to increase donor probability. One important concern is a lack of research looking at FITD online. However, we believe that previous findings are generalisable to a computer-mediated context based on research by Guéguen and Jacob (2002). Using automated, computer based emails, they asked participants to sign a petition and then donate to a charity. Even without face-to-face interaction, individuals asked to sign a petition were significantly more likely to donate than those without the preparatory action. Using an internet-based campaign should hopefully work for us too.

Preparatory actions need to be an internal commitment and quite like the expected behaviour, they are also more effective when they happen publicly. Therefore, we are not pressuring people to sign our petition or providing any rewards for it. Additionally, the descriptions in our Instagram page, petition and petition stating our project motivation are very similar. The petition also asks people for their name, showing a public commitment to the cause unless they opt out of it.

Salience

One aspect of the MINDPSACE framework is salience (Dolan, Hallsworth, Halpern, King & Vlaev, 2010). Individuals are more likely to be influenced by information that draws their attention. This can be from internal mechanisms and external events. Therefore, we wanted to make sure that our social media would be topically salient. Issue salience is determined by many factors such as personal relevance or news coverage (Iyengar, 1979). A recent topic in the news related to our project - Caroline Flack passed away. Her death was particularly relevant to our project because it highlighted how cancelling celebrities as well as negative comments on online platforms and tabloids can have severe consequences. We wanted to make this issue even more salient to our audience so we re-posted articles about Caroline Flack and the negatives of cancel culture. Through these posts we hoped to use an already culturally relevant event to make the issue of cyberbullying more salient. We believe this persuasive technique can change behaviour because of the availability heuristic. The availability heuristic is a concept in social psychology where events seem more common dependent on how easy they are to retrieve from one’s memory (Higgins & Brendl, 1995).

Affect

A further persuasive technique identified in the MINDSPACE framework is affect (Dolan et al., 2010). No stimuli or campaign is evaluated separate from affect. We incorporated positive affect by posting memes on our Instagram page. Humour is effective because it increases attention, leading to better understanding of the topic and potentially changing attitudes. Additionally, the positive affect elicited from humorous appeals means that individuals associate the campaign with positivity making them more likely to pursue behaviour change (Berlyne, 1972).

There is some research that suggests that positive affect and humour specifically are not effective persuasive techniques. Specifically, because it encourages individuals to take the peripheral route in the Elaboration Likelihood model which leads to weaker persuasion (Geuens & Pelsmacker, 2002; Kadir & Lokman, 2014). However, research (Lammers, Leibowitz, Seymour & Hennessey, 1983) suggests that these findings are from studies which only focus on the short-term efficacy of humour as a persuasive technique. Instead of looking at people’s behaviour change in the long-term, previous studies tend to only test participants immediately after recall. They propose that humour can be very persuasive in the long-term but there is a humour-sleeper effect. In their study they compared the efficacy of serious and humourous appeals in behaviour change. They found that in the long-term humourous appeals are more effective potentially because they have a positive impact on cognition making individuals generate more arguments supporting the new behaviour (pro-arguments) as can be seen in the graph below.




Outcome & Future Directions

Outcome of Intervention

The petition and Just Giving page did not reach their targets. We achieved a total of 29 signatures and £0 was donated to our Just Giving page. Our Instagram page had 39 followers by the end of the project. This we believe was not a bad turnout for the time limit given for the project starting in week 3. We aimed to post a meme every few days, however sometimes we were unable to generate a meme we felt was adequate and relevant to our topic. We feel that perhaps we focused on meme production at the expense of other aspects of the intervention. Consequently, the petition and Just Giving page were neglected. Sharing these two links was of high importance in succeeding behaviour change as these were our interventions that we hoped would encourage behaviour change most effectively. Our posts averaged 11 to 13 likes per post, this was dependent on the time of day posted as social media has peak times of post. In order to further the project, we would wish to analyse individual behaviour patterns for using social media to reach a maximum capacity of people.

Limitations

While we had 39 followers, this was not enough to make a significant impact on the overall issue of cancel culture as it is such a widespread phenomenon. On top of posting, we should have attempted to interact more with our followers – perhaps by posting more on our Instagram story to encourage people to look at our account’s content. Encouraging individuals to look at our posts and see that we were more active, would have meant that they would be more inclined to follow our page more closely. The hashtags that we used, were attempted to be specific for the anti-bullying and cancel culture campaign. However, we believe that some of these hashtags were too generic, meaning the saturation of posts that received said given hashtag, were too many for our post to have a significant influence as it was lost in the plethora of posts receiving that hashtag from other influencers who had many more thousands of followers. Alternatively, using obscure or highly relevant hashtags, meant that the quantity of individuals who would see the post was also limited as we could not attract attention if people did not specifically search for those hashtags. This meant that we had to try and get a balance between hashtags that we believed were both not too generic that our posts would get lost but also not too specific that few people would search for them. The maximum number of hashtags that you can have in a post is limited to 30 – this meant that we were limited by the number that we could use. The hashtags we used on a rotational basis are as follows:

#parents #communication #trolls #safeguard #suitableapps #understandingapps #digitalsafetyforkids #onlinecitizen #screentime #bullyfreezone #bullyingatschool #bullys #socialmedia #digitalfootprint #onlinesafetyforkids #teens #teenbully #antibully #internetsafetyforkids #digitalcitizen #tiktok #anonymous #bullyingintheworkplace #stopthehate #cyberbullying #bullying #stopbullying #antibullying #bullyingawareness #love #nobullying #onlinesafety #childabuseawareness #bullyingprevention#cybersecurity #cyberbully #bullyinghurts #safefamilyprograms #mentalhealth #internetsafety #bullyingsucks #youthsuicideprevention #parenting #standuptobullies #thebullyexposed #bully #kidshelpline #bullyexposed #internetsafetyforkids #digitalcitizen #tiktok #anonymous #bullyingintheworkplace #stopthehate #cyberbullying #bullying #stopbullying #antibullying #bullyingawareness #love

Another limitation of our intervention was that we did not utilise social media to its full potential, for example, not following others which encourages reciprocity, and not using other social media platforms to build a larger following. The idea behind this is that if we followed more individuals, they would be aware of our presence on social media. Moreover, by following specific individuals and pages we would have been able to connect with and contact others to spread the word and build our following.

Future Directions

One method we could use in the future could be to target people in real life, using posters with QR codes that link to the petition and Just Giving page, which would increase accessibility. This would make our topic more approachable and attract more attention to our campaign. The issue here is that cancel culture is an underlying social problem. We understand that it is very difficult to cause a societal shift in the right direction however the follower base that we currently have, we feel, is a good starting point for further research and development into the area. Cancel culture is a taboo subject which also makes it difficult to change people's behaviour towards acting online. It is something that works under the surface of the media and society in general. People tend to do it unconsciously. So, we believe that the base we have for change needs to reach a much larger audience. Nonetheless, we believe that making individuals aware of the problem is possible. Awareness has been a key aspect to this problem because it is not talked about and done subconsciously. This means that the first stage in tackling the problem has been to show people what it does to others. For example, we used Caroline Flack as our example case study as we believed that it was relevant and useful for furthering the war against cancel culture.

Another future direction would be to provide further examples of people who have been affected by cancel culture. Perhaps creating an anonymous forum would be interesting so that we could learn from and understand others’ experience. We feel perhaps the creation of the forum will further spread behaviour change within the social structure and normalise discussion of the issue. A lot of what we see in the news is full of celebrities who many view as role models. However, to understand and realise how cancel culture affects the masses we need to understand how other people deal with the trauma and how they have tried to improve their lives.

We could also continue to build momentum by posting more memes on Instagram and using other social media platforms to cultivate a larger following (e.g. using Twitter and hashtags). The inclusion of other platforms, further spreads our influence to the masses and means that we reach more people, which is the aim of our project. The move to further include other platforms, including Twitter, Snapchat, and Reddit, will further enhance our project.

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