Actually, 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.
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.
Actually, 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.
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.