When we debate cancellation, we're mostly debating other kinds of harassment: doxxing, pressuring one's employer to terminate an employee, and defamation. Specifically, we're talking about harassment campaigns--in other words, large movements that engage in any of these behaviors for the purpose of punishing wrongthink. While these mobs have a few people who make death threats, there aren't usually large enough numbers of these threats to constitute a campaign, and even if there were, I like to think that even cancellation advocates would consider this out-of-bounds of acceptable behavior. The debate mostly revolves around the question of whether these harassment campaigns constitute criticism ("the opponents of cancellation just don't want to be criticized" and all that). Of course, harassment is never criticism, and it's always morally repugnant; however, sometimes harassment is legal either in theory (e.g., afaik there is no legal prohibition against doxing) and other times it's legal in practice (e.g., 'defamation' is illegal in theory but the burden of proof is absurdly high).

From the perspective of free speech ideals, "speech" is the expression of an idea; it may be "persuasion" but not "coercion" or "intimidation". Cancellation is both coercive and intimidating by design and by definition, so it falls outside of the boundaries of 'speech'; however, not everything that violates free speech ideals is illegal to the great glee of free speech opponents.

> When we debate cancellation, we're mostly debating other kinds of harassment:

Sure, but I think it is unfortunately that this is the only thing that people talk about.

The reality is that there is a whole bunch of stuff that is really really bad, such as death threats and the like, that will happen whenever there is a hate mob/harassment campaign that was started against someone.

When people try to defend these kinds of online mobs, they tend to focus more on the grey stuff, and they try to ignore the really bad stuff that happens. It is much easier to defend someone just "criticizing" another, instead of the much worse stuff that I've seen happen.

I don't think that someone should be able to distance themselves from the truly horrific stuff that can come out of these kinds of movements. It is much worse than people just be criticize, or whatever. And people need to recognize that those kinds of things happen.

IE, the stuff that happens can often be even worse than the, admittedly still very bad things that you brought up that I agree shouldn't happen either.

And by bringing up the even worse stuff, it gives less room for contrarians to make arguments and claims like "Well, actually, criticism isn't harassment", or "well actually, maybe the person deserved to be the target".

I agree with this to a certain extent, but any side of a large debate is going to have a handful of people who make death threats. I wouldn’t want anyone to think, for example, that criticism of antifa is invalidated or lessened because one or two critics issued threats. If there is evidence that the volume of threats is higher among cancellers than other movements, then that would be good cause for additional criticism IMO.

But everyone should condemn violence and harassment from their own ideological cohort.