No I'm not saying the mechanism has changed, mob rule has probably been a thing since humans organised in groups larger than 5, but the scale and level of scrutiny definitely have.
I'm not familiar with the case of celebrities or Sinead O'Connor specifically, but no celebrity in my lifetime before the advent of this new wave of cancel culture has been completely cancelled the way they are today (even Michael Jackson, who had serious allegations of child molestation, had an O2 concert scheduled shortly before his death).
Even for the average person, if you lost your job due to anti-mob comments in the 50s that didn't bar you from ever finding a job again (which is the case for some today), and this is without even touching on the way some people have had their entire twitter history crawled and pulled apart from a time when they were generally very different people.
As I said, this is probably a function of social media in the modern era more than anything else.
I think people would be blacklisted in exactly the same way in the 50s; this is all fairly well documented in relevant writings from the period.
I think we're in agreement that social media and specifically giving people access to publishing has changed the duration and discoverability of the speech.
Ah I didn't realise the Hollywood blacklist had been that serious! It's definitely not in my lifetime though, I wasn't around in the 50s. I'm also not sure that's a good example; you're talking about what could be termed a national security threat vs. something like saying you don't agree with unisex bathrooms. As I said, the scale is way out of whack.
I'd definitely be interested to see comparisons that are more like-for-like though, if they exist. I'm not familiar with "Time of the Toad", although from a brief look it seems to also deal with Cold War era issues? Again, this isn't a like-for-like comparison.
I'm not familiar with the case of celebrities or Sinead O'Connor specifically, but no celebrity in my lifetime before the advent of this new wave of cancel culture has been completely cancelled the way they are today (even Michael Jackson, who had serious allegations of child molestation, had an O2 concert scheduled shortly before his death).
Even for the average person, if you lost your job due to anti-mob comments in the 50s that didn't bar you from ever finding a job again (which is the case for some today), and this is without even touching on the way some people have had their entire twitter history crawled and pulled apart from a time when they were generally very different people.
As I said, this is probably a function of social media in the modern era more than anything else.