Woke, cancel culture and social practices in everyday life: exploring the boundaries with online hate speech

Despite growing public debate, quantitative evidence on how young people understand and engage with cancel culture remains limited, particularly outside Anglophone contexts. It situates everyday cancellation practices within broader debates on woke culture, cancel culture, and online hate speech, emphasizing digital platforms as arenas where activism, accountability, symbolic exclusion, and public conflict are negotiated. The empirical research draws on a survey of 903 undergraduate students in Spain, a digitally active group. Using descriptive statistics, semantic network analysis, and hierarchical binary logistic regression, the study finds that 49.6% of respondents have engaged in cancellation practices. Semantic analysis shows that cancellation is primarily associated with digital exclusion, with ‘censor,’ ‘block,’ and ‘nullify’ forming the core of its cognitive representation. A smaller portion of responses links cancellation to ‘harass’ and ‘dehumanize,’ indicating a peripheral punitive dimension. Regression results reveal significant associations between cancellation practices and age, specific digital behaviors (especially blocking and censoring), political orientation, and familiarity with the concept—where prior knowledge correlates with a lower likelihood of engaging in cancellation. Overall, everyday cancellation appears primarily as a practice of digital exclusion and interpersonal boundary-setting, while also showing a limited but meaningful semantic overlap with mechanisms of harassment, dehumanisation, and symbolic exclusion.