My issue with "cancel culture" and the way I think it differs from ancient ostracism, is that it frequently ends up targeting people who are NOT social elites with any kind of power.

My best friend has been on the receiving end of cancel culture on Twitter for incredibly innocuous things like:

- Being a fan of Andrew Garfield who wore a do-rag one time in his life

- Thinking Kamala Harris was chosen as VP to appease the Black community in the wake of BLM, but doesn't actually represent the core goals of BLM unlike say, Stacey Abrams, because Kamala Harris is a former District Attorney who was proud of her extremely high conviction rate

- Thinking Lil Nas X had better fashion than Harry Styles

The amount of insane hate and death threats my friend has received for stuff like this has led him to become suicidal on multiple occasions. It doesn't help that he has OCD but this is partly triggered by mass shaming campaigns that attack random Twitter users for "guilt by association" if they don't condemn someone fast enough (or at all).

For a particularly insane example of cancel culture, see the trans activist ContraPoints' video on how she was attacked by other members of the trans community for including a single line in her hour long video read by another trans person called Buck Angel, and how these Twitter haters ended up attacking all of her friends and calling for them to "disavow her". It got to the point where people were being canceled for not disavowing a friend who didn't disavow ContraPoints who had a 10 second line in her video read by a controversial trans man.

None of this behaviour actually holds people with power to account. It just makes ordinary people scared to open their mouths.