Yes, social media can be asinine – but ‘cancelled’ pundits like Bari Weiss aren’t the victims

If you’re familiar with the navel-gazing internecine squabbles of the US national media, you probably know that Bari Weiss, the millennial conservative writer who for years attracted controversy and online consternation for her opinion columns, recently quit the New York Times, saying that the newspaper was insufficiently supportive of her because of her political views.

Weiss’s departure comes on the heels of an open letter, signed by more than 150 pundits, commentators and public intellectuals, Weiss included, that decried the censoriousness of internet “cancel culture”. And that letter itself came soon after the firing of Weiss’s mentor, James Bennet, as the New York Times’ opinion editor, in response to the publication of an op-ed calling for the use of state violence against protesters, which Bennet claimed not to have read.

After announcing her resignation, Weiss published a letter to the paper’s publisher, AG Sulzberger, citing her reasons for departing the paper. “My own forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views,” Weiss wrote. “My work and my character are openly demeaned in company-wide Slack channels.”

Related: Is free speech under threat from 'cancel culture'? Four writers respond

The assertion of much of Weiss’s future work is likely to be that a culture of illiberal liberalism at the New York Times and other media outlets has victimized her personally, and is also gravely dangerous for the republic. Weiss has already moved to enhance her own career by positioning herself as a martyr for free speech and a brave defender of unpopular truths. With this claim, Weiss will have many of her fellow elites nodding along sympathetically: the open letter, combined with a pearl-clutchingly offended response to Bennet’s ouster, has made it clear that there is a section of the professional intellectual class – pundits, thinktank operatives and tenured professors – who feel shocked and affronted by the online rudeness of those who disagree with them. This clique has ushered in a creature unique to the era of internet media, whose ascent ironically threatens to plunge our public discourse even further into the realm of bad faith: the professionally cancelled pundit.

The professionally cancelled pundit is a genre of primarily center-right contrarian who makes their living by deliberately provoking outrage online, and then claiming that the outrage directed at them is evidence of an intolerant left run amok. Usually but not exclusively white millennials or Gen X writers, the cancelled pundit has a sheen of faded patrician prestige, like a stack of unread New Yorkers in a basket beside a toilet. They believe themselves deserving of deference and they think themselves brave for complaining when they don’t get it. They’re beloved by white boomers, Romney Republicans and those who use the word “woke” derisively. Their work is meant to appeal to people uncomfortable with social forces that challenge the established hierarchy of power.

In the open letter, a number of the professionally cancelled outlined the primary assertion of their genre: that the left in particular is unduly censorious and mean-spirited in ways that challenge the free exchange of thought, and rightwing ideas, or at least their own rightwing ideas, should be given a dignified and respectful hearing.

But the letter, and the assertions by the cancelled pundits that they are defenders of free speech, is misguided on a number of fronts.

First, in framing sometimes rude online reaction to their opinions as a first amendment issue, they confuse for a violation of their civic right to free speech a personal discomfort with the tone of those who talk back. And second, while they are correct in noting that platforms such as Twitter, where many of these aggrieved public figures seem to spend a great deal of their time, can be rancorous, they are wrong in assigning the cause of this indecorousness in the public conversation to a censorious nature in the left ideologies they oppose. Weiss and her compatriots believe that public discourse has become less decorous because it has moved to the left. But really, it’s because it has moved online.

The fact is that rudeness is incentivized by social media platforms; the slow, dispassionate “argument” that the professionally cancelled pundit claim to be advocating for is not. “Social media as a ‘public square’ where ‘good faith debate’ happens is a thing of the past,” the Slate writer Lili Loofbourow explained in her own Twitter thread. “Disagreement here [online] happens through trolling, sea-lioning, ratios, and dunks. Bad faith is the condition of the modern internet.” This is in large part because online platforms are designed that way: to maximize engagement, they promote the most incendiary content and reward outrage, shock and performative disdain.

Are the professionally cancelled pundits naive about the way social media platforms incentivize crudeness, or are they merely playing dumb? I suspect the latter. The cancelled pundits are right that social media can be asinine. But they are not victims of this dynamic: they seem to be savvy manipulators of it. Signatories of the open letter, including Weiss but also many others, have built careers and their own notoriety by seeming to solicit and revel in online anger. They direct deliberately offensive screeds at the sections of social media that are most likely to be incensed by them; they pick fights with people with large Twitter followings so that those people will publicly retort.

Watching the behavior of the professionally cancelled makes the outraged attention they receive seem less like an unfortunate or unfair byproduct of good faith engagement than like a deliberately solicited result, leading me to believe that many these pundits manufacture controversy so as to drive attention to themselves – and, crucially, so as to drive web traffic to their pieces. They want to be cancelled, too, so that they can depict themselves as rebels; the outraged attention they solicit has the added bonus of giving transgressive glamour to their otherwise repetitious, poorly researched and incurious writing.

As far as making money goes, this might not be such a bad strategy. In the digital media sphere, where clicks are revenue and outrage drives clicks, attention is itself a currency, and it holds the same value whether it is laudatory or vexed. Of all people, Weiss should have known this: the New York Times opinion section, where she worked, was such a huge driver of traffic that it became integral to the paper’s revenue model, in no small part because of the outraged online attention that her own articles generated. When we consider this reality, the claims that she and the rest of the professionally cancelled make to being defenders of free speech seem like flimsy pretenses of civic mindedness, meant to justify their own careers as glorified shock jocks.

But for all their cynicism and sense of their own victimhood, the professionally cancelled are not solely to blame for their manipulation of social media. So are those of us who reward them with our notice. The outraged are complicit in the actions of the outrage-mongers. If liberals and progressives stopped giving these people our eyes, our clicks, and hours of our lives, then their power to rake in money, to shore up their own fame, and to determine the parameters of the public conversation would be diminished. If we want these people to be less powerful, then we have to stop giving them what they want: our attention.

Weiss’s resignation letter reads less like an internal HR document and more like a pitch for a new venture, and it’s likely that Weiss will soon be outfitted with a book deal or a cushy new perch from which to continue her opining. Hours after Weiss announced her departure from the Times, another professional contrarian, Andrew Sullivan, who has provoked outrage for his repeated endorsements of race science, announced that he would be leaving his longtime role at New York magazine. The conservative talking head Ben Shapiro also left his role as editor-in-chief at the rightwing clickbait outlet the Daily Wire.

The simultaneous moves from three professional rightwing attention seekers prompted speculation that they are planning to launch a new venture together. If they do, it is sure to produce a lot of outrage bait, snappy headlines and unkind missives meant to move readers from shock to anger, and from anger to clicks. This time, let’s not fall for it.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist