Accountability on Social Media: Gina Carano and The Mandalorian
Your voiced opinions will always have consequences.
In early February, Gina Carano posted an Instagram story where The Mandalorian former co-star compared “hating someone for their political views” in the US to the treatment of Jewish people during the Holocaust.
After the post went viral, Lucasfilm and Disney fired Carano from her role as Cara Dune in The Mandalorian on Disney+. They had previously scrapped an upcoming TV series starring Carano after she posted similarly controversial social media posts in November 2020.
In the past, Carano has falsely asserted on Twitter that there was election fraud in an attempt to steal the 2020 presidential election from President Trump. She has also criticized those who wear masks during the pandemic, and posted transphobic comments in her Twitter bio.
Carano has spoken publicly about her firing as an act of “bullying” by Disney. Speaking on the Ben Shapiro Show, Carano said, “They've been all over me and they've been watching me like a hawk, and I'm watching people on the same production and they can say everything they want, and that's where I had a problem. I had a problem because I wasn't going along with the narrative.” Carano claims that her post was similar to progressive co-star Pedro Pascal’s social media advocacy, but that there was a double standard for conservatives in the entertainment industry. Carano further asserted that by not fitting the “narrative” of the entertainment industry, she was being discriminated against as a conservative.
….Ma’am, what?
We’ve all seen the potential social media has for inciting nationalistic violence across the country Social media is more polarizing than it has ever been before, with algorithms both drawing individuals further to the right within mainstream platforms and encouraging them to start their own.
But it’s also encouraging people to ignore context, and, you know, basic common sense.
First of all -- but definitely not least of all considering Carano was willing to publicly throw a “friend” of hers, and the first man of color to actually star in a substantive Star Wars lead role, under the virtual bus — Pedro Pascal’s “controversial” social media advocacy consisted of posting pictures of children in current detainment camps on the U.S. Mexico Border with concentration camp prisoners in Germany, and posting Texas Senator Ted Cruz’s public D.C. office phone number to encourage criticizing his policy decisions. To the former, while Pascal and Carano’s posts on the surface are technically similar in that they both make a comparison to trauma committed during the holocaust, Pascal posted two un-altered pictures side by side and acknowledges similarities with factual grounding. Furthermore, Pascal posted a public office phone number, already widely available and encouraged to be used by the public. When Carano chooses to focus on one half of the analogy as evidence of a double standard, it’s hard to believe that she isn’t intentionally attempting to deflect from the substance of her own comments.
Second, Carano’s indignation might potentially be less eye-roll-inducing if I didn’t have the capacity to read mainstream news sources like Fox News or the BBC, both of which covered her comments in great detail. Carano was allowed to voice her dissatisfaction with her firing every step of the way, and was even given a movie deal with The Daily Wire to further amplify her already incredibly public and powerful platform. Senator Cruz has even publicly supported her for the same comments that Lucasfilm and Disney fired her for. She’s not exactly being silenced — she’s just facing public backlash and private consequences for her own bigotry.
There is a double standard floating around the entertainment industry and on social media platforms, but it doesn’t exist in the way that Carano perpetuates.
It’s that conservatives want the power to say whatever they’d like on social media without being publicly criticized and questioned for their socially intolerant views.
Lucasfilm and Disney are also the last corporate entities who would embark on the conservative witch-hunt Carano is claiming. Disney has often taken action when it comes to their actors that amplified an imperial narrative themselves. But even the media mega-giant is capable of doing the bare minimum to disassociate from an actress whose public comments have contributed to the same misinformation that largely spurred the Capitol rioters in January.
Disney as a private corporation has the right to hold its employees accountable, but more than that, the public also has that right for its public figures. If you want to mock people on Twitter for putting their pronouns in their bios, then people are allowed to call you transphobic. If you want to criticize a public safety measure that every major independent health organization claims is effective at mitigating a deadly pandemic, people on Twitter are also allowed to call your criticism stupid as hell. And if you want to wrongly conflate conservatives in America possessing still-active and popular platforms with people who were literally placed in concentration camps, then your employer is allowed to fire you for not respecting the values they wish to publicly promote.
If Carano doesn’t want to be fired for bigotry, then she should spend more time educating herself on the opinions of those who publicly criticize her so that she isn't behaving as one.
But this does raise a broader question in this new culture of social media we find ourselves in: to what extent should the platforms of public figures be private? That is, when Carano is not actively working for Disney and Lucasfilm — neither shooting for The Mandalorian nor doing promotion for the tv series — should her employers have the right to hold her accountable for what she posts on social media?
So far, the answer seems to be yes. Social media has made our world bigger, more complex, and more connected than ever before. It’s easy to both insulate yourself from those who disagree with you and spark hatred because you’re never going to actually meet the people who you attempt to harm. However, social media has also created an access to information for everyone by everyone in a way that’s never been seen in history. For the most part, this is a good thing we are constantly learning from one another. We can see the on-the-ground activism, experiences, and perspectives of historically marginalized communities.
And, if having access to all of this personalized level of information does not inspire greater compassion and respect, then yes, there will be consequences. Criticizing that is ignoring the broader benefits of a culture of social accountability this creates for all of us.