I think the pace of cancellations and attempted cancellations has been picking up steam and has gotten pretty damn fast very recently. It is possible I am not sufficiently familiar with base rates, but it does seem like the current pace is quite high, so either it has accelerated or people on the peripheries of our community are unusually likely to be targeted. In either case this is cause for concern.
Eg, REDACTED1′s firing, REDACTED2 asked to resign his VP position (but he still gets to be faculty), petition to remove REDACTED3 from his honorary titles.
Also lighter stuff like REDACTED4 forced to delete his Twitter account, and different spats within newsrooms, that I’m not following as closely.
In either case, I’ve updated towards being much more cautious than usual. There are already things I don’t talk about, but I’ve updated to putting “nuanced takes on social justice topics” as on par with “criticizing the Chinese government as a Chinese citizen” for things I don’t publicly talk about.
I talked to other people who are online a lot, and some current college students. The general consensus was substantial concern/alarm, and that people who are older and/or less aggressively aligned may have missed.
Someone said this to me recently: