Cancel culture can be translated into German as exclusion culture.
Cancel culture primarily targets individuals who publicly express problematic positions: through boycotts, mobbing, dismissal, and censorship, their alleged misconduct is to be punished. As a rule, cancel culture aims to displace non-woke individuals from influential positions. The website Cancel-Culture.de documents some of these cases in the German-speaking world.56
The woker the audience of a person, the more easily they can become a target of cancel culture, as woke activists demand strict conformity from their own milieu (so-called milieu control).57
Cancel culture is usually justified as resistance to oppression: anyone who maintains problematic discourses allegedly supports discriminatory structures (see Dominant Society). Marginalised individuals must be protected from problematic persons, which can easily escalate into moralistic purity panic (see Protection).
As a rule, woke activists deny that a woke exclusion culture exists at all: increasing censorship and repression are merely populist fictions; freedom of opinion, diversity of opinion, and freedom of speech are not threatened.58 Opponents of the supposedly non-existent cancel culture are accused of wanting to protect regressive ideas and prevent societal progress.59