Cancel culture and the trend of trying to bring down good people - Colleen Ballinger, Jenna Marbles

Recently I discovered that a Youtuber I like, Colleen Ballinger from Miranda Sings, was in the news for apparently doing bad things. I was surprised to hear this because having followed her channels, watched her Netflix series, and read her book, I never had any reason to think anything bad about her.

I did a little searching to try to figure out what was going on. My search found a lot of news articles saying she may have done some things in the past that some might consider inappropriate. I also searched Reddit and found a lot of people intent on trying to bring her down. I read their reasons and honestly they were not that bad.

I could tell right away that this situation is exactly like what happened to Youtuber Jenna Marbles. It's where there is a good person who has a lot of success and then one day some negative press article comes out saying they did something wrong and then all of a sudden the mob pounces on them and tries to find every little thing they possibly did wrong in their entire life.

This kind of thing gets a lot of media attention so news sites and social media are all over it. Suddenly everyone has an opinion on it. Anyone who ever disliked them or was jealous of them in any way is chiming in on the action.

I'll admit I have not read into all the allegations thoroughly but when you follow someone on Youtube for years and have watched and read a lot of their content you get a pretty good idea of who they are. In my opinion she is a good person plain and simple.

Of course there are probably some things she has done that she would look back on and say “yeah I probably shouldn't have done that, or I would have done that differently”. Of course she probably made some mistakes in the past, but guess what, so has every single person in the world!

But because she is famous she gets attacked by everyone who dislikes her. When you are famous, even if you have millions of people who love you, there are still going to be a small percentage who don't like you. Then as soon as you make one little slip up, they are all over it and try to blow it out of proportion.

It can be contagious to jump on the bandwagon when someone you know has made a mistake. I'll admit there may have been times in the past where I have done the same thing, not to this extent, but something similar.

For example, how many times in your life have you known someone who you thought was ok. Maybe a co-worker who you didn't necessarily get along with but tolerated them just fine. Then maybe one day they leave under bad terms and people start gossiping negative things about them. Have you ever been tempted to join in and give your own take on what you didn't like about them?

This is the kind of thing that happens in these situations to celebrities but on a much larger scale. It is really unfair especially when you have thousands of people trying to dig up your life's history and find every little thing you did that could possibly be interpreted as being even slightly offensive or controversial.

If this was done to everyone, guess what? Pretty much everyone would be “Canceled”. Even the best people in the world make mistakes. I'm not saying we should condone celebrities when they do something that is truly horrible, but I think we really need to give them a break when small mistakes are made, especially when they are from many years ago and the person has since matured or changed.

People like Colleen and Jenna are good people who brought a lot of joy to millions of people. It is a shame when a small group of “haters” band together to try to bring them down and ruin their career.

Keep these points in mind when you see these attempts at canceling celebrities. They may be famous but deep down they are real people just like us who sometimes make mistakes and are not always perfect.

Music artists copying old songs and not giving credit to the original

How many times has this happened to you? You hear a song that you think is an original song only to find out many years later that it was actually a remake of a song that existed decades earlier. For me this happens quite often.

I always feel like I've been tricked or lied to by the artist of the new version of the song. Here we were presented a song as if it was new and we were not told that it was actually just a copy of a hit song from years ago.

Sure, if you do some digging and really search for the production details of the song, you might find some fine print mentioning that it samples another song or that is was based on other song, but rarely will this information be clearly published with the song title.

I think this is unfair to the original artist because they are not really getting the credit they deserve. Often new artists just take a hit song and remake it. Then of course the song is a hit because it has already been proven to be a hit in the past. They took something that was already likable and just reintroduced it again.

Although I don't really like when this is done especially when it is not clear that the song was based on another song that already exists, it is not all bad. The fact that the song is being remade shows that the artist likes it enough to be inspired to remake it which can be a compliment to the original artist.

Also as mentioned earlier, this process introduces a song to a new generation who probably never heard the original and may never have known about it had it not been redone.

Overall I think it is ok to be inspired by a song and then make your own version of it as long as the original artist is clearly given credit so people know where it came from.