The accusation flies fast in our digital age: "It's a modern-day witch hunt!" The phrase is a go-to metaphor for online pile-ons, public shaming, and the rapid fall from grace known as "cancel culture." We invoke the image of Salem – pitchforks, pyres, and irrational fear – to condemn what feels like disproportionate group punishment in our own time.
The comparison feels apt, tapping into a shared understanding of historical injustice fueled by moral panic. But like many historical analogies, it's both revealing and dangerously incomplete. It captures the feeling of being hunted by a mob, but often misses the most crucial, and perhaps most uncomfortable, parallel: who was actually doing the hunting in Salem, and who often drives the dynamics in the online spaces frequently compared to it.
The Forgotten Pattern of Salem
My research, particularly comparing historical panics for the upcoming book The World is Always Never Ending, reveals a stark, often overlooked pattern in the Salem witch trials. We remember the victims – overwhelmingly women, hanged or imprisoned based on flimsy accusations. We remember the patriarchal structures, the religious extremism, the powerful men who presided over the courts. What we conveniently forget, or perhaps what has been systematically erased from popular memory, is that approximately 78% of the accusers were also women and girls.
Salem was not primarily a story of powerful men persecuting powerless women. It was, devastatingly, a story of women and girls gaining unprecedented, temporary power through the act of accusation, and directing that power almost exclusively against other women.
The Uncomfortable Truth: In Salem, those with the least power in society suddenly found their accusations carried immense weight—but they directed this newfound power laterally, at their peers, not upward at the structures oppressing them.
In the rigid hierarchy of Puritan Massachusetts, women held virtually no formal authority. Then, suddenly, the "afflicted girls" found their words carried immense weight. Their spectral evidence—claims of torment by invisible spirits sent by witches—was accepted by magistrates and ministers. For a brief, terrifying period, the least powerful voices in the community became the most consequential, capable of destroying lives and seizing property.
But crucially, where did they direct this newfound power? Not upward, at the ministers or magistrates who upheld the patriarchal system confining them. They directed it laterally, at their peers. The accused were disproportionately women who violated social norms, held resources others coveted, or whose very respectability perhaps felt threatening. They attacked the vulnerable (the beggar Sarah Good), the inconvenient (Sarah Osborne, in a property dispute), the non-conformist (Bridget Bishop, the tavern owner), and eventually even the respected (Rebecca Nurse, Martha Corey).
This was lateral violence, born of genuine fear and social stress, channeled through a system where accusing peers was the only way these women could exert significant power. They were given just enough power to destroy each other, but not enough to change the structures that oppressed them all.
Does This Pattern Sound Familiar?
Consider the dynamics in many modern online spaces often compared to witch hunts—particularly female-centric communities like BookTok or artist circles on Instagram and TikTok. Here too, accusations often flow laterally between peers. Women critique, investigate, and sometimes "cancel" other women.
This Threads post details the case of book cover artist Loni Carr (better known by her artist moniker of The Whiskey Ginger). Accused of using AI based on interpretations of her long-established artistic style, she faced demands for impossible proof—process videos that could themselves be faked. The accusers, often fellow artists or community members, gained voice and moral authority through the act of investigation and accusation—an authority many may lack in professional or economic spheres where creative work is often undervalued.
BookTok is a part of TikTok that is overwhelmingly populated by female creators and audiences focusing on romance books. It often has controversies like this called BookTok drama. This has even resulted in several YouTube channels dedicated to this drama, you can get a little taste here.
The power flows horizontally, targeting peers, while the larger structures—the AI companies scraping art for training data without compensation, the platforms profiting from engagement generated by controversy, the economic systems creating precarity for creators—remain largely untouched.
The Misdirection of Power: Like the Salem accusers operating under conditions of economic stress and social anxiety, participants in online call-outs often act from genuine concern—fear of AI replacing human artists, anger at perceived fraud, desire to uphold community standards. But this legitimate concern, channeled through platforms rewarding outrage and lacking due process, can manifest as lateral attacks that consume the community from within.
Is "Cancel Culture" Actually a Witch Hunt?
The analogy holds in certain structural ways:
Similarities:
- Impossible Proof: Just as Salem's accused couldn't disprove spectral evidence, modern targets often face demands for proof of non-action (e.g., not using AI) or intentions that are inherently unprovable.
- Community Policing: Both rely on community members identifying and punishing perceived deviants from group norms.
- Disproportionate Consequences: While not death, online cancellation can lead to severe social and economic repercussions, often disproportionate to the alleged offense.
But the analogy also fails in crucial aspects:
- Severity: Social ostracization or job loss, however damaging, is not equivalent to state-sanctioned execution. Conflating them risks trivializing historical atrocity.
- Belief System: Salem operated within a widely shared belief in literal demonic forces. Modern conflicts often revolve around competing ideologies, ethical frameworks, or interpretations of harm, which are fundamentally different.
- Power Source: Salem involved state and religious authority validating accusations. Modern online dynamics often involve decentralized networks, platform algorithms, and shifting social consensus, lacking a single centralized power.
The Pattern Worth Recognizing
Perhaps the most useful part of the "witch hunt" comparison isn't the sensational image of burning stakes, but the quieter, more tragic pattern of lateral violence among the relatively powerless. When people lack the means to challenge the systems that genuinely constrain or threaten them, they sometimes redirect their fear and frustration toward peers they can affect. Accusation becomes a substitute for agency.
Recognizing this pattern doesn't excuse harmful online behavior. But it does invite a different kind of conversation. Instead of simply condemning the "mob," we might ask: What are the underlying stresses fueling this dynamic? Who benefits when creators attack creators, or fans police fans? How can legitimate concerns about ethics, AI, or community standards be addressed without resorting to destructive purity spirals?
Finding Perspective: History doesn't offer easy answers, but it offers perspective. It shows us these patterns are deeply human, recurring across different eras and contexts. It invites us to step into the "No Man's Land"—the space where we can hold complexity, acknowledge genuine fears and recognize destructive dynamics, critique harmful actions and understand the conditions that produce them.
The Real Lesson From Salem
Maybe the real lesson from Salem isn't just about the dangers of mass hysteria, but about the tragic misdirection of power that happens when the oppressed turn on each other, leaving the real structures of power untouched and intact. That's a pattern worth recognizing, whether in 1692 or in our timelines today.
This exploration of historical patterns and their modern echoes is central to my upcoming book, The World is Always Never Ending: A Modern Antidote for the Worried Well-Informed and Terminally Online, available on April 2nd, 2026. The book delves into these recurring cycles of fear, accusation, and eventual correction, offering perspective to help navigate our own turbulent times with greater wisdom and less despair.