system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
CMV: There is no empirical support for the Cancel Culture panic

It has become dogma among pundits and regular people on both sides of the political spectrum that “Cancel Culture” is a new and grave threat to society. The claim is that debate has become less open in general and that free speech is under attack because of the Cancel mob.

With the rise of social media amplifying more voices with every passing day, I can totally understand how people have come to this conclusion. What I don’t see is any empirical support for the notion that debate is less open or speech is less free. It is especially strange to see that the panic around it is perhaps most acute among the same people who regularly talk about how we need to return to facts and logic rather than feelings in the discourse. 

How are we measuring the “openness” of debate? If we claim it is less open, when was it more open? Is there any proof that “cancellation” didn’t happen then? Basically- Is there any evidence beyond feelings and platitudes that speech is actually less free now than in the past? 

I haven’t seen good answers to any of these questions, but I fully acknowledge it’s possible that they exist and I simply haven’t found them. So my challenge to the subreddit is to show me that evidence, and give me some indication beyond examples and vibes that modern “cancel culture” actually represents something new and threatening.
gpt
there are numerous cases of people getting fired or forced to resign due to relatively innocuous actions, such as a researcher tweeting about a study on how violent protests affect voting patterns, or the opinions editor of the NYT letting a Republic senator put out an op-ed regarding how military may need to be brought into quell unrest in American cities.  

it's hard to imagine those things happening at any other point in our lifetime.