Imagine you said something ten years ago, maybe a bad joke, maybe an opinion you have since changed. Now imagine waking up to find that comment has resurfaced online, your employer has been tagged, your inbox is full of abuse, and your career is effectively over by noon. You were not arrested. No court was involved. But your life changed completely.
That is cancel culture in its most extreme form. And it raises a question that law has been slow to answer: when a person is publicly shamed into silence, has their right to free speech been violated? And if so, what can the law do about it?
WHAT IS CANCEL CULTURE, REALLY?
“Cancel culture” is a term that gets thrown around a lot, usually by people on opposite sides of an argument. At its core, it refers to the withdrawal of support- social, professional or financial from a person who has said or done something considered offensive. It happens mostly on social media, it moves fast, and it can be devastating.
The term itself is relatively new, but the practice is not. People have always faced social consequences for saying unpopular things. What is different today is the scale and speed. A tweet can reach millions in minutes. A pile-on can destroy a reputation before the person has even had a chance to respond. And unlike a court case, there is no due process, no right to be heard and no real avenue for appeal.
FREE SPEECH AND ITS LIMITS — WHAT DOES THE LAW ACTUALLY SAY?
In India, Article 19(1) (a) of the Constitution guarantees every citizen the right to freedom of speech and expression.[1]
But this right is not absolute. Article 19(2) permits the state to impose reasonable restrictions in the interests of sovereignty, security, public order, decency and morality.[2]
Here is the catch. Article 19 protects you only from the state. It protects you from government censorship and from being jailed for your opinions. It does not protect you from other people choosing not to listen to you, not to hire you or not to associate with you. A private company firing you for your tweets is not a constitutional violation. A Twitter mob making your life miserable is not either, at least not under Article 19.
This is the fundamental tension at the heart of the cancel culture debate. The law protects free speech from government interference. It has very little to say about what happens when the silencing comes from society itself.
REAL CASES, REAL CONSEQUENCES
In 2020, J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, faced massive online backlash after expressing views on gender identity that many considered transphobic.
She was not arrested. She was not sued. But publishers distanced themselves, actors from her films publicly disowned her views, and she received thousands of abusive messages. She has continued to speak — but at enormous personal cost. Was her free speech violated? Technically, no. Was she effectively pressured into a kind of silence? That is a harder question.
Closer to home, in India, comedian Munawar Faruqui was arrested in 2021 under Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code for allegedly making jokes that hurt religious sentiments- jokes he had not even made yet at the show where he was arrested.[3]
This case represents the opposite problem, not cancel culture from society, but the state itself being used as a tool to silence speech. The Supreme Court eventually granted him bail, but the chilling effect was real and well-documented. Both cases, one from the West, one from India, show how free speech gets squeezed from two directions at once.[4]
WHERE IS THE LEGAL LINE?
The honest answer is that the law has not drawn a clear line yet, especially around cancel culture specifically. But there are existing legal tools that come close, each with significant practical limitations when applied to the unique dynamics of online reputational harm.
Defamation law, both civil and criminal in India, offers some protection. If false statements are made about a person during an online pile-on, that person can potentially sue for defamation. But this remedy carries with it the practical limitations. First, defamation requires a false statement of fact and opinions, however harsh, are generally protected. So if a thousand people call you a bad person online, that is almost certainly not defamation, even if it destroys your reputation. Second, identifying and suing hundreds or thousands of anonymous users is logistically and financially prohibitive for most individuals. Third, by the time a defamation suit concludes, the reputational damage is already done, as the internet does not wait for court verdicts.[5]
The Information Technology Act, 2000 and its rules address some forms of online harassment, and the recently proposed Digital India Act seeks to modernise these provisions.[6] Yet these frameworks, too, fall short when confronted with cancel culture’s specific character. They are designed to target identifiable bad actors engaging in repeated and targeted conduct. Cancel culture operates differently. No single tweet may cross a legal threshold, and the harm lies in the aggregate weight. Current law has no mechanism to hold accountable for collectively devastating someone, when each participant acted within their individual rights.[7]
This is the core legal gap. Cancel culture is often a diffuse wave of criticism that is individually lawful and collectively devastating. Existing remedies are insufficient, leaving the victims with little recourse.
SHOULD LAW INTERVENE AT ALL?
This is where it gets genuinely complicated. Many argue that cancel culture is simply accountability. That powerful people who say harmful things should face consequences, and that social pressure is a legitimate democratic tool. On this view, asking the law to protect people from criticism is itself an attack on free speech.
Others argue that the consequences are disproportionate, say, suppose a private individual loses their livelihood over a decade-old tweet, even if no law was technically broken.
There is also the question of who gets cancelled. Research consistently shows that cancel culture does not affect everyone equally. Powerful celebrities often recover. It is ordinary people – teachers, small business owners, students who face the most permanent damage from online pileons, with the least resources to fight back.
The United States has seen some legislative attempts to address this, with several states passing laws against what they call ‘viewpoint discrimination’ by large tech platforms.[8]
India has not gone down this road yet, and perhaps wisely so — such laws raise their own serious free speech concerns.
CONCLUSION
Cancel culture is real, its consequences can be severe, and the law is genuinely struggling to keep up. The existing framework of constitutional free speech protections, defamation law, and IT regulations was built for a different era. It was not designed for a world where public opinion can be weaponised at scale in seconds.
But the law alone cannot solve this. A society that cancels first and asks questions later has a culture problem, not just a legal one. The answer probably lies in a combination of stronger online harassment laws, better platform accountability and most importantly, a collective decision to slow down before we destroy someone.
As future lawyers, we will be the ones asked to draw these lines. That is not a small responsibility.
Author(s) Name: Chhavi Poplani
References:
[1] Constitution of India 1950, art 19(1)(a)
[2] Ibid art 19(2)
[3] Indian Penal Code 1860, s 295A
[4] Munawar v State of Madhya Pradesh (2023) SCC OnLine SC 493
[5] Indian Penal Code 1860, ss 499, 500
[6] Information Technology Act 2000
[7] Ibid; Digital India Act 2023
[8] NetChoice LLC v Ken Paxton [2024] 603 U S 707; Moody v NetChoice LLC [2024] No 22–277