(You can thank me later.)
Deplatforming is not silencing, and it’s not censorship – it’s not impeding speech… when the speech and communications continue. And it does! Here’s the evidence!1
Manoel Horta Ribeiro, Homa Hosseinmardi, Robert West, Duncan J Watts, Deplatforming did not decrease Parler users’ activity on fringe social media, PNAS Nexus, Volume 2, Issue 3, March 2023, pgad035, https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgad035
These results indicate that deplatforming Parler was ineffective at reducing the consumption of the type of content that was deplatformed. It increased user activity on other fringe social media platforms and did not significantly decrease the total user activity on all fringe social media platforms taken together.
And this makes total sense. Because deplatforming is not about censorship. Platforms use deplatforming for the same reason I don’t invite my neighbor’s chickens inside my house. At worst it would be a health hazard and at best it would be highly disruptive.
My house is not a chicken coop and I have cats that would react who knows how. We’d have to move if for some weird reason chickens were mandated intractable in my parlor.
You can only do so much to avoid pervasive annoying behaviour and disruptive people in a particular venue. I find it almost impossible to avoid hostility, misinformation, malinformation, disinformation, pseudoscience, and grift on Twitter nowadays. If there are enough disruptive people that lots find untenable, and there are insufficient rules to mitigate the issues, it will drive off everyone who is bothered by the situation, and whatever locale it is, it will be left with just the disruptive people and those who like that sort of thing, and some people who need to be there to make money. Deplatforming or having rules to follow is not about censorship, because people who go against the rules and get deplatformed for it, simply go elsewhere with their voice and their content is consumed.(ibid.) The few who slip through are more easily avoidable because their numbers are low, and their disruptions limited. As Jonathan M Katz explains, “It’s about keeping sites from being overrun and made unusable…”2
Jonathan M. Katz, 1:40 PM – APR 23, 2023
It’s so exhausting having to explain this to people over and over, but here we go again I suppose. What happens every single time on the internet is that the people who don’t want to be around and harassed by the Nazis / transphobes / misogynists / racists / whatever do exactly what you suggest: they argue, then they block, then they leave. And the result — again, every single time — is that the message board / site / app is left to the horribles and becomes a cesspool.
A big problem on social media is the problem of silos where people have trouble getting a good look at reality because it’s being filtered through algorithms that deliberately keep people distracted in bubbles,3 only seeing what will keep them on the app, which is usually a skewed selection of offerings to manipulate, engage, or outrage, to benefit the platform company.4 But a viable answer to this is NOT to try to force people to put up with unavoidable abuse, grift, subversive disinformation, and targeted harassment. People simply won’t put up with it for long. Nobody I’m pals with wants to share a sofa with chicken shit. And for some reason there are a lot of people on social media with the express purpose of pooping all over everything. Influence peddling and professional trolling is big business.5 Sometimes the job of a paid troll is to just make a forum “so stinky that normal people won’t want to touch it” according to Leonid Volkov quoted in The New Yorker in 2016.6 A lack of dissent is not the problem, it’s the lack of de-scenting.
My neighbor’s chickens were fluffy and cute, some amber colour rhode island reds and I’m sorry to say that they have indeed been silenced – though not by me denying them the comforts of my sofa. They disappeared last week, arousing suspicions in the neighborhood, probably because of bird flu reports.7 But maybe they were sold to a new chicken coop home upstate. Or something else.
I apologize for that lousy plot twist.
But I maintain that the metaphor of Twitter as a lousy AI generated giant poo covered chicken coop sofa is valid.
And if deplatforming does NOT reduce consumption of fringe communications, it simply cannot be called censorship or silencing.
1
Manoel Horta Ribeiro, Homa Hosseinmardi, Robert West, Duncan J Watts, Deplatforming did not decrease Parler users’ activity on fringe social media, PNAS Nexus, Volume 2, Issue 3, March 2023, pgad035 https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgad035
These results indicate that deplatforming Parler was ineffective at reducing the consumption of the type of content that was deplatformed. It increased user activity on other fringe social media platforms and did not significantly decrease the total user activity on all fringe social media platforms taken together.
2
Jonathan M. Katz, 1:40 PM – APR 23, 2023
It’s so exhausting having to explain this to people over and over, but here we go again I suppose. What happens every single time on the internet is that the people who don’t want to be around and harassed by the Nazis / transphobes / misogynists / racists / whatever do exactly what you suggest: they argue, then they block, then they leave. And the result — again, every single time — is that the message board/site/app is left to the horribles and becomes a cesspool. It happened to 4Chan. It happened to Gab. It happened to Telegram. It happened to Facebook in a lot of countries. It’s happening now to Twitter. And if we aren’t careful, it will happen to Substack. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. It’s not about jailing wrongthink. It’s not about silencing “dissent.” (The people who whine about this stuff the loudest have the most normie, retrograde views on everything anyway, if occasionally turned up to 11.) It’s about keeping sites from being overrun and made unusable by complete fucking assholes.
3
This is what we observe, for example, in distracted driving while using cell phones, or in the tunnelization effect in air traffic control, during which what happens outside the focus of attention escapes the sagacity of the radar operator. Such examples are to be found in applied psychology textbooks, and the implementation of visual scanning procedures imposed on operators, pilots, surgeons, and other experts involved in surveillance duties, is systematized in training courses. These procedures are themselves very costly in terms of attentional resources, very tiring, and require a collaborative organization of the workstations, with digital devices to assist, substitute and monitor the human actors. The distraction domain is one of the main aspects of cognitive warfare. It has two complementary components: attentional pollution with the distraction of focus, and the exploitation of digital flaws or interfaces of digital assistance or monitoring tools.
4
Hypernormalisation Documentary, 2016, by Adam Curtis.
”The liberals were outraged at Trump. But they expressed their outrage in cyberspace so it had no effect. Because the algorithms made sure that they only spoke to people who already agreed with them. Instead ironically their waves of angry messages and tweets benefitted the large corporations who ran the social media platforms. one online analyst put it simply — angry people click. It meant that the radical fury that came like waves across the internet no longer had the power to change the world. Instead it became a fuel that fed the systems of power making them ever more powerful.”
5
Axios: The global business of professional trolling by Sara Fischer – Apr 13, 2021
Troll farms can create a symbiotic relationship between political actors eager to manipulate adversaries and developing nations eager for cash. CNN, in conjunction with Clemson University, last year uncovered a major troll operation in Ghana being used to sow division among Americans ahead of the 2020 election. The operation was linked back to the Russian state-backed troll operation called the Internet Research Agency. Carroll, a 20-year veteran with the FBI, said that in his time investing troll operations, he saw many from places like Vietnam, Philippines, and Malaysia — “places where there’s a lot of cheap labor and little oversight.”
6
The real effect, the Russian activists told me, was not to brainwash readers but to overwhelm social media with a flood of fake content, seeding doubt and paranoia, and destroying the possibility of using the Internet as a democratic space. One activist recalled that a favorite tactic of the opposition was to make anti-Putin hashtags trend on Twitter. Then Kremlin trolls discovered how to make pro-Putin hashtags trend, and the symbolic nature of the action was killed. “The point is to spoil it, to create the atmosphere of hate, to make it so stinky that normal people won’t want to touch it,” the opposition activist Leonid Volkov told me.
7
An aggressive strain of avian flu capable of wiping out entire flocks of domestic birds is sweeping through the United States — and as of this week, Pennsylvania has more cases than any other state in the country, data from the Department of Agriculture show.