Cancel culture: Do you hate or support DaBaby?

This study is concentrated around cancel culture and, in particular, DaBaby’s cancelation process. As it was identified, the issue of cancel culture is prominent but is not studied well since the concept is relatively new. Nevertheless, cancel culture was present in various forms before it had been labeled accordingly. The scandal around the music band Dixie Chicks is argued to be the trigger for the development of the modern interpretation of cancel culture. It was suggested to continue researching the phenomenon as it may lead to hurtful consequences such as hate speech and doxing. Therefore, it was decided to study the perception of cancel culture from the perspectives of the ones who support the movement (anti-fans), and the ones who try to defend the accused individual (fans) to retrieve the motivation of both parties which could suggest the further positive development of the phenomenon. Thereby, the study concentrated around the recent cancelation of the rapper named DaBaby who translated homophobic statements on the stage of the festival Rolling Lound 2021 in Miami. Thus, the central research question was constructed: “How do DaBaby’s fans and anti-fans differ in their perception of the artist’s cancelation after his homophobic statements towards the LGBTQ+ community?”. It was decided to follow the qualitative approach by conducting semi-structured interviews with the participants. Twelve interviews were conducted where six individuals represented anti-fans sub-group and other six participants represented the sub-group of fans. The participants were approached through Twitter and Instagram as the participants representing the sample are active on these communicational platforms. The further textual transcripts of the interviews were analyzed with the help of Atlas.ti as the analysis followed the three steps of the Thematic Analysis. The analysis resulted in four major themes which were Ambiguity, DaBaby’s acquisitions, Cancel culture’s effectiveness, and Ethical & Moral considerations. It was identified that both sub-groups acted from the perspective of their values where anti-fans were more liberal and fans were more conservative. Besides, fans are motivated to support the artist they listen to. Nevertheless, the central finding to answer the research question is the ambiguity of cancel culture. Despite fans translated negative opinion about cancel culture, they yet admitted that necessary regulations should apply to specific influential cases, whereas anti-fans agreed that cancel culture may be overused in the negative manner. Therefore, hate-speech regulations, critical approach to cancelations, and attention to the relevant severe cases can be applied to enhance the cancel culture’s efficiency. It is suggested to enrich the number of participants in the study, conduct extra research of adjacent concepts, and to keep the ambiguity in mind in the future works regarding the cancel culture.