Of course there’s no real threat of Dolly Parton being “canceled,” either now or really at any time. Parton has deftly navigated her career to become one of the few Americans above reproach to the point of coming as close to universally beloved as humanly possible. Also, “cancellation” really is no longer a thing. Aside from revelations of the most reprehensible behavior, few if anyone is going to be excommunicated from society via word policing or other such silly notions.
But make no mistake about it, some still yearn for that pandemic era where they could ruin people’s lives with simple pull quotes and mischaracterizations. Dolly Parton has always been a “White Whale” for some of those who love to ruin lives because she’s so universally beloved, and division is where certain individuals find their greatest traction and social clout, especially via social media.
Members of academia have also been strongly enticed to attempt to destroy Dolly Parton’s universal appeal for years. If they can break Dolly Parton, they can break what they believe to be the artifice of the entire White identity. They’ve continuously failed to make a dent of course, though it looms out there in the offing always as the Holy Grail of academic papers or dissertations. Dolly’s also been attacked by right-leaning media for similarly flimsy reasons.
The latest effort to cancel Dolly Parton is extremely dedicated to one particular social media platform, but is also so extremely pronounced on that particular platform to the point where it’s absolutely dominating it, and has been for the last 48 hours or so. We’re talking about Threads, which is Meta’s (Facebook, Instagram) short form platform similar to X/Twitter.
Though you might not have a Threads account or care to even concern yourself with it or social media in general, at 400 million users, Threads has become easily the biggest short-form X alternative around. The other major competitor “Bluesky” only has 40 million users, for example. Donald Trump’s Truth Social has just over 6 million.
But of all social media platforms, Threads might be the worst for hyper sensationalizing polarizing topics, and trying to whip people into a veritable frenzy—yes, even more than X/Twitter, and by a wide margin. Part of the reason for this is how terrible the interface is at actually informing you what or why whatever is trending has become such a hot topic.
With the Dolly Parton “cancellation” attempt for example, it might be half to 2/3rds of the posts are actually people asking, “Why is everyone trying to cancel Dolly Parton?” with probably most of the responses either being misleading or incorrect, since discovering that information is extremely difficult.
But after taking an extended moment to really dig for the source of the latest Dolly Parton cancellation campaign, it appears to be misappropriated pull quotes from Dolly Parton’s latest book, Star of the Show: My Life on Stage that was released on November 11th. A user by the name Africanboheme posted, “I’m five minutes into Dolly Parton’s new book, she said: I watched my uncle say racist things, and get in trouble, I ‘learned what not to say’. He was such a good respectful person … I don’t know what to do.”
It’s not even 100% clear what exactly the Threads user is implying here, especially with the loose use of quotation marks. But in many respects, that’s why it went viral, along with the thousands of Thread posts that followed. It was the ambiguity that seeded the virality as the hive mentality and social contagion took over. All people knew was that Dolly Parton was being canceled for being exposed as racist, and that was that.
But the actual quotes from the actual book are much more neutral, while the viral Thread conflates two different individuals. The uncle cited in the viral Thread is Dolly Parton’s uncle Bill Owens. He was Dolly’s first real musical mentor and manager, and was instrumental in helping to launch her career. He also apparently said racist things at times, but Dolly in no way was condoning this in her book. She was distancing from them and showing her disdain.
The second set of quotes of “‘I learned what not to say’ … He was such a good and respectful person” comes from a completely different character in the Dolly Parton universe: radio and TV personality Cas Walker of the Cas Walker Farm and Home Hour. This was one of the first places Dolly Parton got her start in entertainment. She was introduced to Cas Walker by her uncle Bill Owens, but the two quotes about the two separate men got pulled out and smashed together to make the viral Thread.
What Dolly Parton says in the actual book is, “Cas was just a simple man who had a good business mind, but he was very controversial, and at the time, he kind of got really called out for a lot of it. He would get on the air and just talk about anything and everything, not knowing that he shouldn’t. He didn’t care either. I learned what to say and what not to say from him, but I also learned the business end of things from him. I would watch how he would maneuver, and I’d watch how he would treat the artists and people. He treated us all with respect.”
Subsequently, the original author of the original Thread said, “An update and a retraction, this is the direct quote from the book that set my Spidey senses tingling…” while posting a screenshot of the actual quote from the book. But like almost always happens in these instances, the correction/retraction has only received some 3.7K views, while the original Thread has received some 715K and counting, not to mention the thousands of other Threads portraying Dolly Parton as racist.
So the next question people will likely have is how much does any of this matter? The simple truth is that over the last 48 hours, the amount of individuals who’ve decided Dolly Parton is a racist for condoning her uncle’s racist rhetoric has dramatically increased. Even some people who are defending Dolly are taking the fake Dolly quote about her uncle at face value, since the corrections and explanations are the least viral aspect of the situation.
Some will definitely say, “This is just social media. This doesn’t matter.” But in truth, this information might matter even more than if it was published by a major publication.
As conventional media continues to evaporate, and social media becomes the primary, if not solitary information feed for individuals, it can, has, and will continue to result in significant and damaging canards emerging throughout society that most certainly can affect the legacies of individuals like Dolly Parton. Cancel culture may be over, but that doesn’t mean it can’t still have a corrosive effect.
Artificial Intelligence only promises to make this issue worse as this social media activity feeds into answers generated by Chat GPT and other interfaces due to the amount and virality of the activity. Luckily, the original thread did receive a “Community note” correcting the record, but not until well into the viral moment.
These canards and outright falsehoods continue to warp the reality of things, while the time and resources credible media outlets have to correct them and set the record straight continue to be diminished due to the proliferation of AI and social media.
It’s a big problem.
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