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BEAUTY
* The beauty influences' social media drama involved a mess of unconfirmed facts, hurt feelings and subscriber live counts.
It started with a video - or was it an Instagram Story promoting vitamins?
James Charles and Tati Westbrook - and Jeffree Star, who inserted himself into the fray somewhere along the way - have publicly put an end to the virtual maelstrom that moved millions. The highly publicized back-and-forth between 20-year-old Charles, who shot to Internet stardom in 2016 when Cover Girl named him its first male spokesmodel, and 37-year-old Westbrook, Charles' mentor who is credited as one of the first beauty influencers, centered around a social media post promoting vitamins and mushroomed over allegations of sexual harassment.
The exchange took off on May 10 with Westbrook's "Bye Sister" video and snowballed online for a full nine days until Charles declared a truce on his Twitter account. The drama initially cost Charles about 3 million subscribers - he ultimately gained back about 2 million - while Westbrook gained nearly 4 million subscribers. YouTuber Tea4Real even posted a video supposedly showing Charles' and Westbrook's subscriber counts changing in real time, and YouTube has since announced it will change the way it displays subscriber counts.
Cancel culture is nothing new to the online world. It's like a virtual boycott, but potentially more dangerous because of the uncontrollable nature of social media. It usually happens like this: a celebrity or personality is accused of doing or saying something deemed so egregious by social media users, they collectively "cancel" the person in question, posting "receipts" in attempts to damage his or her career. The canceling sometimes includes a Twitter hashtag party - in this case, #JamesCharlesIsOverParty - which is apt to go viral, jettisoning the canceled person to the Internet's abyss, temporarily or permanently.
"Cancel culture is a byproduct of our ability to advocate for ourselves on social media," said Angelica Nwandu, founder of popular Instagram account The Shade Room. "It comes from a great place, but what I've suggested is that we cancel the behavior and not...