The Woke Who Did Not Cancel

The most famous Sherlock Holmes story is probably “Silver Blaze,” better-known as “the story of the dog who did not bark”:

“Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”

“To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”

“The dog did nothing in the night-time.”

“That was the curious incident,” remarked Sherlock Holmes.

When I saw this graph, this famous Sherlock Holmes story immediately came to mind:

What’s the connection? Simple: Given the left-right imbalance at top social media companies, their level of cancelling is shockingly low. The D/R donation ratio for Twitter is more than 75:1. Facebook’s D/R donation ratio is “only” 17:1. With this overwhelming imbalance, you’d think both companies would long since have kicked off everyone even vaguely right-wing. They’re private companies. They have the legal right to clean house. Yet they’ve cancelled less than 1% of what you’d think they want to cancel.

What’s going on? I stand by the obvious Beckerian explanation. Twitter and Facebook may be packed with hard-left employees, but they’re still for-profit businesses. If they cancelled everyone with cancel-worthy political views, they’d lose a large share of their customers. Which would soon cost them a large share of their current profits - and spur new competition. Since the financial cost of ideological purity is high, they buy only a token quantity.

Amplifying this effect: Conflict is exciting - and customers crave excitement. If Twitter and Facebook thoroughly purged their ideological enemies, the resulting monoculture would be dull as watching paint dry. Instead, they keep the vast majority of their enemies around to keep the global shocking match going.

The “dog that didn’t bark,” to repeat, is the vast majority of non-left voices and positions that hasn’t been cancelled. What about the tiny sliver of dogs who do bark? What’s going on there?

A consistent Beckerian would say: Social media only cancels to maximize profits. When a voice is so obnoxious that it actually, on net, drives customers away, they muzzle it.

Beckerian as I am, this is a bridge too far. Yes, it’s probably good business to ban the Nazis. Most of the cancellations, though, are just too arbitrary to make sense from a profit-maximizing point of view. I suppose you could say that Twitter cancelled the Babylon Bee as part of a grand strategy to goad Elon Musk into bidding $44B for Twitter, but that’s absurd.

The better story is that social media companies are so rich that they’re willing to sacrifice a tiny share of their profits to get petty revenge on their least-favorite people. And when they select their “least-favorite people,” they do so in the same haphazard manner as most of the human race - what I call “the Unbearable Arbitrariness of Deploring.” What drives their cancellations is neither profit nor philosophy, but hysteria and herding.

P.S. I’m driving to Mount Etna, Syracuse, and the Valley of the Temples this weekend. If you want to meet up, email me.