Comment on Erasure
Bamboodpanda@lemmy.world 1 week agoActually, this situation isn’t about cancel culture at all. Cancel culture typically refers to public backlash resulting in personal or professional consequences for offensive or harmful behavior. What happened here seems to be a systemic decision to remove content highlighting women in STEM at NASA.
This isn’t driven by public outcry or social pressure; it’s a form of institutional erasure. There’s a big difference between being held accountable for harmful actions and having your achievements wiped out due to a policy change.
These two things shouldn’t be conflated.
MacNCheezus@lemmy.today 1 week ago
I think you are misinformed about the nature of cancel culture — it was always a government program. Those mass account purges on Twitter over COVID “misinformation”, for instance, happened explicitly at the behest of the Biden administration. It was not at all the result of public outcry.
Also, many of the claims that were made (such as the lab leak theory) did, in fact, turn out to be true.
Bamboodpanda@lemmy.world 1 week ago
On Cancel Culture: The term “cancel culture” typically refers to public backlash leading to personal or professional consequences for perceived offensive behavior. In the case of the NASA bio removal, it appears to be an internal policy decision, not a result of public outcry.
On Government Influence and Social Media: While there have been instances where government entities have interacted with social media platforms regarding content moderation—such as the Biden administration’s efforts to curb COVID-19 misinformation—this differs from “cancel culture.” These actions involve governmental attempts to manage public health information, which has sparked debates about free speech and censorship.
On the Lab Leak Theory: The origins of COVID-19 have been extensively debated. Agencies like the FBI and the Department of Energy have assessed, with varying degrees of confidence, that a lab leak is a plausible origin. However, this remains a separate issue from the NASA bio removal and the broader discussion of cancel culture.
Bringing up these points seems to divert from the initial discussion about the removal of a NASA bio highlighting a woman’s achievements in STEM. It’s essential to distinguish between institutional decisions, public backlash, and government policies.