Studies point to the positive role Twitter can play in social justice campaigns. Using Critical Discourse Analysis, this paper looks in detail at one such case: a racist call-out in Canada, which trended on Twitter in many countries leading to its coverage in mainstream media outlets. It had the characteristics, labelled at the time by critics, of ‘cancel culture’, where there were calls for sackings and boycotts. This analysis demonstrates that there should be caution in regard to how social media platforms such as Twitter are able to lead in such matters of social justice. The paper shows how its affordances can work against coherent and careful discussion, fostering fast, simplified, contradictory commentary, where individual tweets load a range of different concerns onto a specific instance. In this particular case, this results in an individualization of racism, which therefore becomes decontextualized and depoliticized. While those tweeting revel in and enjoy their shared moral position, actual endemic structural racism in society remains invisible, and they misrepresent, arguably, the key question that this racist outburst raises.

研究表明，Twitter在社会正义运动中可以发挥积极作用。本文使用批判性话语分析详细研究了一个这样的案例：加拿大的种族主义言论，在许多国家的Twitter上流行起来，导致其在主流媒体中的报道。它具有当时被评论家标记为“取消文化”的特征，在那里呼吁解雇和抵制。该分析表明，在诸如Twitter之类的社交媒体平台如何领导此类社会正义问题上应谨慎行事。本文展示了其功能如何与连贯而仔细的讨论相抵触，形成快速，简化，矛盾的评论，其中单个推文将特定问题上的一系列不同关注点加载到了一起。在这种情况下 这导致了种族主义的个体化，因此变得脱离情境和政治化。尽管那些发推文的人享受并享有共同的道德立场，但是社会中实际的地方性结构种族主义仍然是看不见的，并且他们可以曲解这个种族主义爆发引起的关键问题。