Out for insurance companies in 2025: providing coverage for people whose homes are in the path of natural disaster. In: offering coverage for celebrities and executives who get dragged for bad tweets. Insurance agency Samphire Risk is creating “cancel culture” insurance for those who fear the woke mob may one day come for them, according to a report from the Financial Times.
So let’s say you get canceled. You tweet something like, “why don’t you go tell the homo and transgender parents to start teaching their kids better morals?” or perhaps say a Black woman is like if the “muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby.” Just what can Samphire Risk, a Lloyd’s of London-backed firm, do for you?
Well, under the company’s cancel culture insurance policy, which it calls Preempt, you—the canceled—get crisis management communications services designed to help you minimize the damage done by online outrage. You’ll get 60 days of comms work after your inciting offense that will work to negate negative coverage both on social media and in traditional media. You’ll also get access to a 24/7 hotline, in case you fire off a tweet at 3 am while you’re buzzing off an Ambien and need someone to step in before the markets open. Additionally, the policy provides a team of researchers and analysts who can identify any potential reputational issues that you may need to get out in front of.
It’s kinda weird timing for launching this product. After all, we’re back in the Trump era and this time social media companies are fully on board, with Elon Musk turning Twitter into a right-wing propaganda arm and Meta bending all its content moderation policies across Facebook and Instagram to invite the worst people you know to share their thoughts on marginalized people without consequence. It’s the Wild West out there again, people drop the R-slur and it barely registers.
But that probably won’t stop the most risk-averse (and rich) from snagging some extra protection, just in case—even though cancel culture basically does not exist, especially for rich people. You’d be hard-pressed to find someone of means and power who has faced such backlash that they’ve lost everything. Lost an opportunity, a show, some money, sure—we usually just call those consequences for your actions. But most people take a beat away from the limelight and return, often to more fanfare than when they left. Mel Gibson, famously “canceled” for being extremely antisemitic and racist, has a new movie out. It was the highest-grossing at the box office over the weekend, and the dude is doing press tours calling Trump “daddy.”
Meanwhile, a meteorologist in Milwaukee got fired for acknowledging on her Instagram that Elon Musk performed two very Nazi-like salutes. Gonna go ahead and guess she’s not the demographic that the cancel culture insurance company is looking to protect.
Read the full article here
