GB News. Will anti-cancel culture campaigns emerge to cancel the cancel culture campaigns – or try to?
by Charlotte Gill, Conservative Home:
In an appalling but unsurprising state of affairs, Stop Funding Hate (SFH) has set about trying to cancel GB News. I say unsurprising because, long before the first show aired, SFH had been campaigning – although no one could have predicted how quickly it would make gains.
Helped along by other Twitter activists, SFH’s prime tactic involves pressuring advertisers to stop funding channels (“funding hate”, as its Enlightened Keyboard Warriors see it) and unfortunately it is rather a successful one. So far, companies including Ovo Energy, Octopus Energy, the Open University and Kopparberg have paused spending with GB News, and others have since followed.
Several organisations claimed that they didn’t know they had been advertising in the first place (don’t you just hate when you accidentally advertise?!). Others took a more moralistic position. IKEA, for instance, said it had safeguards “from appearing on platforms that are not in line with our humanistic values”, and OVO Energy, while pausing its spending, Tweeted it believes in a “kinder world” and wants to “promote inclusion and diversity”. Just not diversity of thought, it seems…
In withdrawing their advertising, these organisations are not only hurting themselves (GB News has brought in ratings higher than Sky and the BBC, after all), but entrenching a dangerous culture that has gripped the West – whereby bullying and cancelling people/things now masquerades as social justice. This illiberal liberalism should have been put to bed long ago, but political and corporate cowardice has seen it exacerbate.
How do we stop it, though? That’s the tricky question, as Twitter activists have proven incredibly organised and capable of achieving their goals. The mainstream (because this isn’t just a right-wing phenomenon), on the other hand, sometimes seems at a loss as to how to respond, perhaps hoping these worrying trends will go away.
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