Games of truth and the cancel dispositif on social media

Abstract

In recent years, the cancel culture has been established on social media as a type of virtual torture in which subjects are exposed, judged, and punished for speeches or conduct considered “morally” reprehensible by other networks users. This court reveals the heterotopic character of the web, in which power is exercised in an even more diffuse way in a “synoptic society”, where everyone is authorized to monitor and punish. Considering the regularity of this social phenomenon on the cyberspace, the objective of this article is to analyze how cancel culture, as a surveillance and control dispositif, which drives games of truth. To achieve this objective, we mobilized concepts from Foucauldian Discourse Studies, such as discourse, power, dispositif, and the will to truth. Regarding the methodology, we selected a singular discursive event from a network of enunciative dispersion to which the practice of cancel culture is applied, involving the volleyball player Maurício de Souza, accused of homophobia in social media. Through the analysis of this case, we can glimpse diverse wills to truth in social media that reveal the complexity of this dispositif and the nature of discourse as an object of power and resistance.