Arguing against the existence of empirical evidence showing real consequences is absolutely gaslighting, and I see it all the time from primarily left-leaning folks who, without always saying it, believe the people who were cancelled fully deserved their punishment, without bothering to assess the context or conditions of the situation in relation to our fundamental rights in society, where fair trial and freedom of speech/thought are ignored in favor of an unregulated digital militia composed of Twitter bots and large corporations like VISA/Mastercard coercing businesses to terminate payments for controversial people -- while narrative-approved late night entertainers humiliate you and people like you for daring to exist, opine, and jest differently than them as they broadcast their dogmatic standards as gospel to their fervent viewers who fail to see through them.

I recall when Patreon spent way too much manpower to silence Sargon of Akkad because their payment providers were enforcing their own private societal norms on Patreon's users, by proxy.

Imagine, if you will, that you're an Uber driver and while driving someone to their destination, you nearly get hit by another vehicle and in your fear, you scream an expletive that upsets just this one customer. You later lose your ability to drive for any taxi service because their payment services refuse to facilitate paying you for that one cross remark.

Many people argue that private companies have every right to deny service or operate their services in any way they like, but if most of them are operating in unison to control speech and aid in humiliating average people for breaching their "community standards", then having a society with rights to free speech, expression, and thought without undue punishment outside of the court of law is pointless. These rights may as well not exist if they only serve a vocal, angry minority. The irony being that those same rights are protected for them because large corporations use them as fodder for shallow marketing campaigns that take advantage of human compassion towards manufactured victimhood that inaccurately represent the realities of this world, signaling their defense of complete lunacy for profit.

Cancel culture is an absolutely pathetic way to treat citizens in our society, I don't care how "private" your company is in their ability to make decisions like these — you cannot deny the backbone of society to individuals for spilling their milk.