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Not being able to persuade others to stop associating with a bad actor seems to be an overreach of a definition of cancel culture. Either you prohibit sharing anything negative or you end up trying to define what is a legitimate or illegitimate reason to call people out.
My opinion is that cancel culture operates at a level removed from the actual behavior you dislike and is more about interactions with third parties. To put forward my own definition: cancel culture is when you attempt to compel others who are not directly performing an objectionable behavior to disassociate from that objectionable behavior. Just trying to spread the reason you personally disengaged or persuade another party of the badness of a particular action is not cancel culture.
The type of behavior defined above is toxic because it puts people or organizations in the position of having to take sides in areas which may be completely unrelated to what they do. This is why many things are splitting towards either woke or anti-woke stances and neutral is becoming harder to find.
A real-world example of this is the idea that "if you have 10 people sitting at a table and one is a Nazi, you have a table of 10 Nazis." Cancel culture is the idea that some things are too awful to interact with in any way; not denouncing and disassociating from them is sufficient proof you hold objectionable ideas.
This definition doesn't require debates over sharing comments like "that reporter who you think is honest has published a bunch of lies" or "the leader of that animal welfare charity secretly kicks puppies" which I do not think any reasonable definition of cancel culture should prohibit.
As long as you can interact with someone who continues to read that reporter or support that charity despite what you consider bad behavior then you have a society where people with differing opinions can live and work productively together. While this does not prevent people from deciding as a group that they dislike a behavior, a world where people followed this rule would mitigate the worst effects where third parties are pressured into deplatforming while leaving the freedom for people to stop directly supporting things they find horrible.
From Scott's sets of examples, I think this definition would define as cancel culture A5 onwards (unsubscribing from content simply because it platformed actors you dislike), B1 (newspapers holding the university responsible for non-official behavior of an employee), and possibly C2 (holding Atlantic workers responsible could go either way for me depending on whether or not they're in an official capacity at the time). It also leaves me agreeing with P3.
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