Things get cancelled all the time, for different reasons. That meeting you were not looking forward to attending anyway got cancelled because people could not coordinate their schedules. A postage stamp gets cancelled with a marking from the post office to show that it has been used and should not be used again. You cancel an order after you change your mind and do not want the item anymore. A TV show gets cancelled when it does not bring in good ratings. When something is cancelled, it goes away.

Cancel is getting a new use. Cancelling and cancel culture have to do with the removal of support for public figures in response to their objectionable behaviour or opinions. This can include boycotts or refusal to promote their work.

What is this latest coinage and craze of the cancel culture? I suspect that not many of us have truly grasped its true meaning. Cancel culture refers to rapid boycotts of whoever, including companies and media after they say or do something considered objectionable or offensive. Cancel culture usually stems from call-outs on social media, which can spiral into mass shaming or harassment campaigns.

It can be considered a form of social justice for marginalised groups. Remember the sweeping #MeToo movement, which used a hashtag to empower women victimised by sexual abuse, sexual assault and rape to share their stories? Remember how statues of Confederate leaders, which were removed during Black Lives Matter protests, mainly due to online criticism deeming them racist, went viral in no time at all?

Cancel culture is also highly effective in condemning high-profile figures accused of sexual misconduct, racist jokes or transphobic beliefs. It is also used to hold white people accountable for racist, degrading or demanding behaviour following viral social media posts.

Cancel culture may now be a long-overdue way of speaking truth to power, enabling marginalised people to resist long-standing forms of abuse and prejudice. The call-outs often challenge historical inequalities and bring greater accountability to those in positions of power.

There are some critics of cancel culture who believe it is an unfair and indiscriminate rush to judgment that relies on "mob mentality". Others have likened cancel culture to a witch hunt against public figures for various personal, political, and ideological reasons. Others, still,  have said cancelling someone can be an overly disruptive form of intolerance.

We all remember how Twitter and Facebook imposed their toughest restrictions ever on former President Donald Trump after he incited his supporters to storm the US Capitol in Washington in an attempt to overturn his election loss. Both companies temporarily suspended the ex-President from posting on their platforms and removed several of his posts but stopped short of permanently banning him. Even after suspending Trump’s accounts, Facebook and Twitter remained platforms where mass shaming, harassment campaigns and misinformation continued to circulate almost freely.

Silicon Valley’s moves to eject former President Trump from social media represented a display of power the companies have avoided making for years. Now Twitter Inc., Facebook Inc., Apple Inc., Amazon.com Inc., Alphabet Inc.’s Google and others must reckon with what comes next. The actions against Mr Trump illustrate more starkly than ever the companies’ influence over conversation online – and the political nature of their decisions. While lauded by many, ejecting the ex-President and some of his supporters also infuriated others who said it amounted to censorship and the moves risked driving off some users in a way that, especially for Twitter, could reshape their businesses. It also illustrated the political nature of how they determine what content to remove, what content to allow and what to amplify.

"Cancel culture" or the idea that people too often pile onto others for bad behaviour, emerged only in the past few years but has become a ubiquitous phrase in these modern times. Former Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump had both criticised a culture of relentlessly calling people out for alleged wrongdoing. Once, in an address at Mount Rushmore, Trump had said it was "the very definition of totalitarianism". As social-media users decry cancel culture and poke fun at the criticism itself, the phrase has come to describe a wide variety of behaviours and their consequences.

On one end of the spectrum are people like Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein and R. Kelly who were cancelled by the public before their sex crimes trials. On the other end are everyday people. Despite the seemingly positive intentions of many cancellations, basically, to demand greater accountability from public figures, people tend to call out cancel culture itself as a negative movement, suggesting that the consequences of the cancellation are too harsh in minor instances or represent rushed judgment in complicated situations. Others have criticised that criticism, saying cancel culture does not exist. With the varied usage and wide debate around the term, it is reasonable to ask where it came from and how it is becoming a part of everyday speech.

The phrase was popularised only in the past few years. Now it is everywhere. "Cancel culture" came into the collective consciousness around 2017, after the idea of "cancelling" celebrities for problematic actions. As troubling information came to light regarding celebrities who were once popular, such as Bill Cosby, Michael Jackson, Roseanne Barr and Louis C.K., so come calls to cancel such figures. The cancellation is akin to a cancelled contract, a severing of the relationship that once linked a performer to their fans.

The objective behind cancelling is often to deny that attention so that the person loses cultural cachet. An offshoot of the cancel culture is the attention economy – when you deprive someone of your attention, you are depriving them of a livelihood.

Social media is full of swarming political and ideological mobs these days. Contrary to democratic tradition, they do not try to win the other side over. They only condemn and attempt to silence. I would dare to describe the cancel culture as "social murder".

Dr Mark Said is an advocate