Do Americans Care Who’s Cancelled?

From Louis CK to Ellen Degeneres, Ranker data tells us that getting “cancelled” isn’t the celebrity career-killer that some imagine it to be.

Photo: Flickr

It’s the debate that you can’t avoid having. The moment one controversy about a public figure ends, another scandal comes along to start the outrage cycle all over again. Whether we are catching up on the latest news about some celebrity getting cancelled, or reading the latest editorial about how it’s the people who are cancelling celebrities who should be cancelled, Americans are constantly being goaded into developing an opinion on “cancel culture.” 

Merriam-Webster says that “to cancel someone (usually a celebrity or other well-known figure) means to stop giving support to that person.” But critics claim that cancel culture (a term for what they see as a censorious intellectual climate created by social media) is more insidious, framing it as a kind of intellectual mob violence. Former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss went so far as to call cancellation “a form of social murder,” alleging that it can ruin your career, “making a person radioactive.”  

But data from Ranker lists featuring many cancelled celebrities doesn’t tell a story quite that simple. In many cases, actors, comedians, and journalists do see their reputation among the public take a serious hit. But in others, getting cancelled has little to no effect on how people view them — some celebrities even seem to benefit from the negative publicity.

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When we first set out to research this article, we predicted that the celebrities accused of the most heinous misconduct would be the ones who were affected most by the efforts to cancel them. That’s certainly true of Kevin Spacey, who saw his steady climb up our list of Best Film Actors take a nosedive after the media began focusing on accusations of sexual assault against the actor spanning nearly 30 years.

NOTE: This graph maps the position of Kevin Spacey on our Best Actors in Film History list. Keep in mind that the graph is a little counterintuitive, as a trend upward in this line actually indicates that Spacey has gone down on the list (because the best actor is at #1). For example, though the line graph goes up from 2017 through most of 2019, it means that Spacey actually went down on our list during that period. A line trending upward means Spacey is becoming a less popular film actor, while a line trending downward means he’s becoming more popular. Get it? Got it? Good.

Spacey was at #14 on this highly competitive list with 2.4 million votes in September 2017, when BuzzFeed published allegations that the actor was sexually inappropriate with a minor. As more people stepped forward to accuse him, Spacey fell further and further down the list. By 2020, he had fallen down to #74, sinking a total of 60 spots (even in this case, however, it’s hard not to notice how long it took for this drop to occur).

But other celebrities accused of misconduct on a similar scale seemed to be less affected by their cancellation. R. Kelly had been battling charges of predatory sexual behavior for more than twenty years before finally being jailed on charges of sex trafficking and racketeering in July 2019. But the R&B artist has been on a shaky trend upwards on our list of Best Singers Of All Time since 2017. Neither the January 2019 documentary Surviving R. Kelly, which attests the singer was grooming underage women to participate in a sex cult on his properties in Atlanta and Chicago, nor his arrest later that year seem to have affected his ranking. At #524 in April 2017, Kelly climbed as high as #380 in May 2020.

Photo: Ranker

Aziz Ansari, on the other hand, was cancelled for pressuring a woman to go further into a consensual romantic hookup than she felt comfortable going. Most people can probably agree that this is inappropriate behavior worthy of rebuke, but not on the same level as the kind of methodical, deliberate abuse that R. Kelly was accused of. Yet his slide down the list of Funniest Comedians of All Time since the story about Ansari broke in January 2018 would indicate that he’s been hurt far more by his cancellation than Kelly was.

Starting at #30 at the beginning of 2018, Ansari had fallen 26 spots to the #56 position by September 2019. The story is worse for Ansari than the chart would indicate: though he had climbed back to #46 in May 2020, the comedian is currently lower on the list than ever, now all the way down at #78.

None of this is to say that any of these individuals should not have faced public scrutiny and condemnation for their actions. It’s to demonstrate that the effects of getting “cancelled” vary widely from case to case, and that the severity of those effects aren’t always commensurate with what the cancelled person in question is being accused of.

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In other cases, we found that being cancelled did negatively affect a celebrity’s ranking, but not nearly enough for that cancellation to constitute a “career-ruining” incident. Take Louis CK, whose admission of sexual misconduct in November 2017 caused him to fall from #3 to #7 on our list of the Funniest Stand-Up Comedians of All Time.

It should be noted that this is a competitive lists, and that CK owed his position on it to thousands of votes cast before his cancellation took place. That means that it takes a good deal of votes over time to cause a significant shift in the ranking. In fact, since this data was collected, CK fell an additional two spots to #9.

But the allegations against Louis CK were a huge and impactful moment in the #MeToo movement — it’s hard to believe that people just didn’t notice it or factor it into their decision to vote for him on this list. To fall a measly six spots in that time suggests that the impact of this controversy on the average person’s idea of Lois CK is far less serious than some would suggest. 

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And it doesn’t always take very long for a cancellation to push someone’s ranking down. Ellen Degeneres, for instance, saw her ranking on The Most Trustworthy Celebrities take a tumble in October 2019. The talk show host and prominent LGBTQ advocate’s progressive cred was called into question after Degeneres was photographed at a baseball game with President George W. Bush.

Only a few days after we captured data on Ellen’s position on this list, allegations of rampant sexual harassment and mistreatment on the set of Ellen’s show were written up in the mainstream press. In that short time, Ellen has fallen 16 spots to #50 on the list — just below Chuck Norris.

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Of course, Ranker data can only tell us about public opinion — many of the people mentioned in this article faced professional and often legal consequences for their actions. To say that getting cancelled has not affected these people’s lives and careers would be inaccurate.

But this data does undermine a central argument of the case against “cancel culture”: that being cancelled always makes you “radioactive” to the public. It’s true that in some cases, like that of Ellen Degeneres and Kevin Spacey, getting cancelled does take a toll on your public image. But in other cases, the effects of cancellation seem more or less limited to the upper tiers of the entertainment industry. We may be told that cancel culture is one of the country’s most vital political topics, but the evidence that this culture is destroying people’s reputations is a lot weaker than you might think.

These stories are crafted using Ranker Insights, which takes over one billion votes cast on Ranker.com and converts them into actionable psychographics about pop culture fans across the world. To learn more about how our Ranker Insights can be customized to serve your business needs, visit insights.ranker.com, or email us at insights@ranker.com.