‘Cancel culture is a form of neo-Stalinism’: the writer defending France from woke zealots

France has a strong tradition of free thinking, but is now under sustained attack by modern-day puritans - AFP
France has a strong tradition of free thinking, but is now under sustained attack by modern-day puritans - AFP

The internet is an instantaneous and international machine. Type something damning in London, and someone else can read it immediately in Accra. Outrage spreads worldwide, flaring up for a brief period before dying down again – only to be resurrected a year later, or in half a decade’s time, when someone else revives the offense all over again. There is, as yet, no “day of forgetting” online.

David Doucet is a French journalist, and writer of the new book La Haine en ligne: Enquête sur la mort sociale (Online Hatred: An Enquiry into Social Death). He’s no stranger to online punishment himself, after his purported involvement in the “Ligue du LOL” (”LOL League”) affair – an episode not, perhaps, widely known in the English-speaking world.

The “Ligue” was a private Facebook group, set up in 2010, and “exposed” by the French newspaper Libération in February 2019. Some of the members were young journalists, male and female, who used the group to swap stories, gossip and news. When the story broke, members of the “Ligue” were accused of coordinated harassment of others on social media. In his book, Doucet, who had left the group years earlier, admits that at one point he’d made a prank call, pretending to be a television producer.

The sanctions for Doucet and others were punitive: thousands of social-media condemnations were followed by job losses, exclusion and other forms of social and economic sanction. Doucet himself was eventually exonerated of any harassment, but not before he was fired as one of the chief editors of Les Inrockuptibles, a major cultural magazine, even after the editor had offered him the possibility of an amicable parting of the ways. Replaced by a female journalist specialising in LGBT issues, he is currently suing his former employer for unfair dismissal.

Doucet’s book broadens the scope, to cover a series of largely French cases in which someone was punished for an offensive tweet or Facebook post, sometimes to such an extent that the ‘transgressor’ was hounded out of their home. This might seem surprising – isn’t France, after all, one of the last anti-“cancel culture” countries standing? Alongside Catherine Deneuve, more than a hundred Frenchwomen in 2018 refused the logic of MeToo, defending flirtation and arguing that women were not first and foremost victims in need of protection. The French do not denounce Woody Allen, and Louis CK has performed there without protest.

The film star Catherine Deneuve has become a lodestar for France's resistance to cancel culture - AFP
The film star Catherine Deneuve has become a lodestar for France's resistance to cancel culture - AFP

So what is happening in liberated France? “Hatred and the urge to lynch have existed since the dawn of time,” Doucet tells me. “But new technologies have given them a scale that we could not have imagined. Pack phenomena have never seemed so powerful.

“In Orwell’s 1984, the people have two minutes of hatred a day to let off steam. Reality has surpassed fiction – there is no longer any time limit to the daily hatred that is exerted on the Internet and we would almost fight to obtain two minutes of calm.”

Doucet paints a bleak image of the unstoppable quality of digital punishment. His book draws on the work of René Girard, an increasingly relevant French anthropological philosopher who died in 2015 and dedicated much of his work to understanding how the “scapegoat mechanism” is absolutely foundational to human culture.

“It only takes one person to throw a stone at someone,” Doucet says, “for them to be joined by hundreds or even thousands of stone-throwers. The escalation of violence during digital lynchings is also explained by the lack of regulation that reigns on these platforms, but also by a physical dematerialisation, which doesn’t encourage restraint.

“On the internet,” he continues, “distance reduces guilt and reinforces feelings of impunity. Hidden behind your computer screen, you can destroy people and trample on their reputation without even knowing them.”

Relative unknowns undoubtedly suffer more than those protected by wealth or other kinds of social status. Doucet has a clear sympathy for those who fall foul of this asymmetry. Stars like JK Rowling have some protection in the form of wealth; a few, such as the writer Bret Easton Ellis, can even laugh off cancellation. When Doucet speaks to Ellis, he comments that “the phenomena of cancel culture are based on moral accusations and not facts. So, obviously, all this poses a threat to our freedoms, those which constitute our culture and which are trampled underfoot today.”

David Doucet, a journalist and writer, has just published La Haine en ligne - Albin Michel
David Doucet, a journalist and writer, has just published La Haine en ligne - Albin Michel

But how does (say) a teenager cope with becoming the object of hatred? Not everyone can afford to use internet cleaners or lawyers to repair their reputation. In La Haine en ligne, for instance, Doucet looks at the singer Mennel, born to a Syrian-Turkish father and Moroccan-Algerian mother, who in 2018 was excluded from a reality TV show, The Voice, when controversial messages she had posted on her Facebook profile were dug up; she was accused of casting doubt on the role of terrorists in the Bastille Day attacks in Nice, in which almost 90 people were killed. Mennel apologised, condemning terrorism, but the outrage machine was unstoppable.

“She experienced a terrible media lynching,” Doucet tells me. “But today she says that she’s stronger – this ordeal has allowed her to be no longer dependent on the eyes of others, and to know what she wanted to do with her life. Today, she is working on an album called Heal, which will portray her journey of resilience.”

Doucet paints a largely redemptive picture, yet sometimes the experience of being hounded by an online mob, is utterly destructive to individual lives. I tell him that I wonder whether there’s something of a religious aspect to the experience of being “cancelled”. In 9th-century Khorasan (in central Asia), for example, there existed a mystic Muslim sect that followed “the path of blame”, seeing a spiritual practice in self-blame and social ostracism.

Doucet agrees. “I did meet people who found in their ordeal a way to prove themselves… When your world falls apart, you end up focusing on the essentials, on your deepest desires. The trauma caused by these collective lynchings pushes some people to surpass themselves or even to use what they have experienced as an artistic material.”

How have we, today, arrived at a post-liberal culture that rushes to condemn but refuses to forget or forgive? “What is surprising,” Doucet says, “is that however forged by a Christian culture we are, forgetting and forgiveness are on the way to extinction. The Internet has transformed us all into public figures who have to face up to the mistakes or inglorious relics of our past digital identities.

“Milan Kundera wrote that ‘living in a world where no one is forgiven, where redemption is refused, is like living in hell’. There is no possible future based on such authoritative thought patterns. When everyone is cancelled,” he adds jokingly, “maybe people will get bored and have more mercy on their neighbour.”

But what moral right in the first place do people believe they have to judge others? I ask Doucet if he feels as though there is something quasi-religious in the zeal of the new moralists who seek to punish others in the name of “social justice”. He describes them as setting up “designated enemies” who become “sacred figures that have to be debunked”.  He explains: “Society is united by sacrificing one of its fellows, set up as a scapegoat. During my investigation, I interviewed people who engaged in this kind of lynching, and I could see how these great public humiliations allowed them to release their frustrations or anxieties.”

He remembers meeting an animal-rights activist, Julien Sayag, who launched cyber-harassment campaigns against trophy-hunters in Africa. “When I asked him about the springs of his motivation,” Doucet says, “he answered me with the ‘emptiness’ in his life since he broke up with his family, but he also said that it provided him with a means of being socially recognised.

“For those who see themselves, rightly or wrongly, as the oppressed of the system or left behind, there’s a kind of jubilation in taking justice into their own hands. In the past, the word of God was not discussed – it was obvious. During online lynchings, morality is set up as an indisputable totem. Social networks participate in a great race for moral purity and the building of a binary world: the good and the bad, the dominant and the dominated.”

But in any purity spiral, as the French Revolutionary Terror teaches us, the righteous have a hard time knowing when to stop. Doucet agrees: “The problem is that you are never virtuous enough not to be targeted. In this, cancel culture is a form of neo-Stalinism, since the Red Guards end up killing each other.”

Where might today’s online sadism end? Doucet points out that internet corporations have a vested interest in maintaining rivalry and animosity. “They no longer hide [the fact that] polarisation and conflict are part of their business model. It is high time that they allocate more resources to moderation, and that they integrate the presumption of innocence in their interface.”

Among the interlocutors in Doucet's book is the novelist Bret Easton Ellis, who refuses to bow to online censors - FilmMagic
Among the interlocutors in Doucet's book is the novelist Bret Easton Ellis, who refuses to bow to online censors - FilmMagic

Even so, we face a moral crossroads as a society, and change isn’t the responsibility of web giants alone. “We can all participate on a small scale in this paradigm shift,” Doucet stresses, “by refraining from throwing stones when someone is targeted by digital mobs’. He defends, too, the freedom of artists to “provoke and push” limits, to avoid compliance.

But, for Doucet, it isn’t appropriate to dismiss out-of-hand the sources of online rage – or even brush off some of the motives behind cancel culture. “We are in a period of change,” Doucet says, “and I believe that we must hear the anger coming from the Left. We cannot just condemn their radicalism or their excesses. The legitimate demands for justice should not be sealed off.

“The day when justice responds more quickly to the requests of victims and minorities feel more represented, I hope that trials will no longer be held on the Internet, and that the values of tolerance and empathy will be more commonly shared.”

Doucet himself continues to work freelance as a journalist, and has founded his own company, Baltique Media. But he remains troubled by his experience of large-scale righteous indignation, not to mention the errors newspapers and individuals seem happy to repeat, without evidence. His sympathy for the “cancelled” is clear throughout his book and our interview.

The internet, as Doucet’s book shows, exposes our deep human need to punish others. We find scapegoats: we revel in shaming others who have, in one way or another, transgressed, or perceived to have done so. The human desire to find others “evil” so that we can feel better about ourselves may be ancient.

The contemporary means of recording sins, however, does not forget. How might we learn to live with each other once again in the light of this?

La Haine en ligne: Enquête sur la mort sociale is available from Albin Michel at €18.90. Info: albin-michel.fr