I don't think anyone claimed that what happened to the Dixie Chicks was OK. Also, it sounds as if you think that cancellation is better if it's democratic. If so, you need to address the 150-year old argument made by Mill, that democratic popular opinion can be particularly oppressive and dangerous to minority viewpoints:
"Like other tyrannies, the tyranny of the majority was at first, and is still vulgarly, held in dread, chiefly as operating through the acts of the public authorities. But reflecting persons perceived that when society is itself the tyrant — society collectively, over the separate individuals who compose it — its means of tyrannizing are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself."
You should maybe continue reading Mill, because nowhere in his writings, or those of anybody else who used the phrase "tyranny of the majority" prior to the modern age, believed that the solution was disempowerment of the majority and tyranny of the minority.
Surely if you think that majoritarian tyranny is bad, you must also believe that minoritarian tyranny is far worse, right? Such as when a select few individuals of a particular racial, gender, and social class, have complete control over popular media, with the sole power to decide who is successful and what damaging information about powerful people can becomes public knowledge and which is kept secret?
Also, quoting Mill while claiming that an individual consumer freely choosing to not buy a product is "tyranny" is laughable to the highest degree.
> disempowerment of the majority and tyranny of the minority
These are two different things, though. You can disempower the majority without empowering the minority. Power is not a zero-sum game - you can disclaim it without handing it over to someone else.
So what, take the right of speech away from everybody? If the majority can't decide how the public feels about a person or company, and the minority can't decide how the public feels about a person or company, than who does?
The obvious response is to not take the right of speech from anybody, regardless of how democratically the decision to do so is arrived at.
More broadly, just because some power can be exercised by somebody, doesn't mean that it has to be exercised by anybody. To the extent that it may be necessary for a functioning society, it's generally best to decentralize power to the extent possible - think council democracy and similar arrangements, where decisions are made at the lowest applicable levels, and delegation of power flows upwards, not downwards. Some real-world approximations of these can be seen with the Zapatistas, and more recently in Rojava. In both cases, there are local governments that can democratically ban certain things as you've described - but, being local, their power is inherently limited in scope. Thus, it's tyranny of the local majority, and dissenters are free to move away and organize their own communities that do not implement such bans (but still federate with others that do).
I don't understand how your first paragraph is relevant. Nobody here is claiming that we need to end democracy! Similarly, nobody is arguing for a system where a few control the entire popular media. (And the current media landscape looks nothing like that: there have never been more different news sources available at the click of a button, and anybody who wants can start one up.) Lastly, again your third paragraph is a straw man.
> And the current media landscape looks nothing like that
Yes, congratulations, you found the point.
The current media landscape is nothing like that, because the current media landscape is only about 10 years old. For all of modern history until the introduction of social media sites like youtube, twitter, and facebook, the only way to spread information or opinion was to get the editors of for-profit media companies to agree to publish you.
It is beside the point but also worth pointing out that also until very recently, like the last decade, the editors of those institutions have been of a very particular gender and racial demographic.
The new media, with all of it's "discourse" is democratic editorialism. Welcome to the freest market of ideas the world has ever seen. You can't call up your buddies Ailes, Rosenthal, Jordan, Sorenson, and Klose to tell the public what to think about you anymore.
> Lastly, again your third paragraph is a straw man.
We're talking about "cancel culture" here, aren't we? The phenomenon where members of the public decide based on new information to stop buying products because of the beliefs and actions of their creators? What is that if not the democratic free-market action that Mill so often advocated as the optimal way to organize society?
"Like other tyrannies, the tyranny of the majority was at first, and is still vulgarly, held in dread, chiefly as operating through the acts of the public authorities. But reflecting persons perceived that when society is itself the tyrant — society collectively, over the separate individuals who compose it — its means of tyrannizing are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself."
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