The Hypocrisy of Cancel Culture Warriors: Why Social Media Must Remain a Free Marketplace
While exploiting the Andrew Kibe fiasco Stivo Simple Boy opinions, content creator Mohamed Asad M. Alby was desperately trying to drag us back to the dark days of censorship and cancel culture.
According to Alby, Kibe deserves to be cancelled for hurting the feelings of self-righteous puritans who have appointed themselves as the moral police of social media conversations.
But people who live in glass houses should never throw stones. If anyone deserved cancellation, it should have been Alby himself after his ugly online spat and extended beef with content creator Sumeya. Despite projecting a polished Mr. Goody Two-Shoes persona, he was exposed as a scammer and hypocrite who hides behind that facade while luring friends into endless squabbles purely for clout.
Yet we extended him grace. We allowed that personal drama to play out without poking unnecessary holes into it, because we have far bigger battles to fight than policing petty online beefs.
Let no one misconstrue the current backlash against Andrew Kibe as something new or foreign. Podcasts and the wider social media ecosystem cannot, and should not, operate under the same suffocating guidelines as mainstream media. This space exists precisely to provide a platform for alternative, unfiltered views.
When Aoko Otieno went on Oga Obinna’s podcast detailing how John Mbadi was doing ungodly things to her in Parliament’s urinals, there was no coordinated outrage or cancellation attempts. But because Stivo Simple Boy has carefully curated the image of a slum-dwelling underdog who “made it” against all odds, there’s now this unhealthy wave of extended grace, pity, and selective moral panic.
This is content. This is social media. Not a Sunday school classroom.
We prefer this raw “oppression” to the toxic era of cancel culture, where figures like Boniface Mwangi, Adele Onyango, and the now-defunct “Twitter A” brigade led by Frankie Media MK would gang up to destroy people’s careers and livelihoods.
Things got so absurd that even EABL - an alcohol manufacturer - engineered the sacking of Shaffie Weru, as if their own products weren’t harmful to society.
That era of weaponised outrage is long gone. Today it’s a true marketplace of ideas where natural selection ultimately elevates or downgrades creators. There is no free ride. Blocking or cancelling one person does not magically transfer their audience to your struggling content.
This is not mainstream (githeri) media, where merit is systematically blocked and regime-friendly quacks are elevated to god-like status.
Citizen, KTN, and NTV operate as gatekeepers for the political establishment. They platform useless, substance-deficient young activists, give endless airtime to controlled opposition figures, and run townhalls that are utterly devoid of intellect, depth, or genuine challenge to power.
Jeff Koinange specializes in manufacturing celebrity around empty vessels while real, independent voices are either ignored or deliberately smeared.
Social media, for all its chaos, remains one of the few spaces where ideas compete on something closer to merit. You cannot bribe the algorithm forever. You cannot cancel your way to relevance. The audience decides - sometimes harshly, sometimes unfairly - but at least the contest is more open than the tightly controlled echo chamber of traditional media, where narratives are pre-approved by those in power.
As someone who is bullied daily by Andrew Kibe and large sections of the Kenyan internet - arguably the most trolled Kenyan online - the last thing I would ever support is censorship or cancel culture. I know exactly how it was exploited by talentless opportunists to bring down those who actually posed a threat to their feeding troughs.
This is the internet. Let your agenda, your manifesto, and your ideas compete fairly in the open. Anything less is intellectual cowardice.
Bravo GenZs: You have locked down Kenya on #SabaSabaRevolutionDay.
You have shown tyrant @WilliamsRuto and his treacherous conman @RailaOdinga that Kenya ni marwa (Kenya belongs to us.)
The protests should continue countrywide until Ruto falls!
Viva!
#HappyBirthdayAlbertOjwang
#SabaSabaRevolutionDay
#OccupyStatehouse2025
#OccupyEverywhere
#RutoMustGoNow