6 ms·

Deplatforming Backfired

34 points by sbuttgereit 10mo ago

n4r9 10mo ago
This article is predicated on an unfounded counterfactual. Who knows what would have happened if Trump's twitter account hadn't been banned? Also, it seems a bit off to describe Musk's leadership of Twitter as triggering the return of "the free and open internet".
- BobSonOfBob 10mo ago
  Funny, the Musk comment tripped me up as well. Since it is clear the Twitter algos and Grok are sycophantic. Yet … the article resonates with me. Deplatforming. Canceling. Suppressing. Has not worked. Moderation. Healthily engagement. Acknowledgement but not acceptance. Can that work?
  - testdelacc1 10mo ago
    It resonates with people who aren’t personally affected by the Overton window shifting towards extremism. It’s now more normal to fling racist slurs at people online, and that behaviour is coming offline as well. When we used to “deplatform” racism this sort of talk wasn’t within the Overton window. Of course if you’re not personally affected you’ll say this is fine, marketplace of ideas etc. Let the marketplace sort out if racism should be normalised or not. It doesn’t even lead to better discourse. We’re both here, commenting on this forum right? It’s because the level of discourse here is higher than elsewhere, certainly much better than “free speech” platforms like Musk’s. How can that be, when HN has extraordinarily strict rules on acceptable speech? Even calling someone an idiot can get you banned here, let alone a pajeet or Paki. If you truly believed in freedom of speech, you’d quit a forum moderated like this.
    - deleted 10mo ago
      [deleted]
- ch4s3 10mo ago
  > This article is predicated on an unfounded counterfactual. I think it's just evaluating the claim that removing these people from a public platform removes their ideas from popular discourse, which obviously didn't work. The article is arguing that failing to engage bad ideas head on leads to increasingly insular an polarized groups within society.
  - n4r9 10mo ago
    > which obviously didn't work But... how obvious is that? Perhaps it did significantly reduce those ideas when it was active. Like, if Musk hadn't reinstated Trump's account we could be looking at a different presidency.
    - ch4s3 10mo ago
      Again you didn’t read the article. Read it or fuck off and stop arguing about the headline.
      - n4r9 10mo ago
        Yeah, I read the article. It doesn't address the possibility that the causality could be the other way around. The stuff about Trump and Bhattacharya is just odd. Trump rose back to power after Musk bought Twitter and gave him a platform to spread lies again. Then Trump appointed RFK, who appointed Bhattacharya as a sort of token gesture. The Fuentes stuff is just as odd - his popularity waned while he was censored, but after being reinstated to X he grew his base to a million followers. Again, how does this support the claim that deplatforming was a negative move? I guess there's two competing narratives: deplatforming never worked, vs deplatforming was working until Musk stepped in and undid it. The article does not give any compelling arguments for the former.
        ch4s3 10mo ago
        Did you read it though ? The article is about negative polarization spirals. You keep missing that entirely.
- vpShane 10mo ago
  Agreed. The internet is a wild ride of walled garden algorithms, dead internet theory, bot comments with other bot comments, like farming, influenced sway-the-masses, scam laden AI generated nightmares with major platforms requiring IDs, biometric verifications where you're fingerprinted, scanned, identified and crapped on. Deplatforming removes a voice to a captive audience where one has entire lively hoods taken from them, their viewpoints suppressed and are forced to other platforms where the userbases are questionable offering their own infinite scrolls and dopamine hits and their own cancel cultures. It is what it is.
SanjayMehta 10mo ago
Sounds like deplatforming is a variant of the Streisand effect.
pjc50 10mo ago
If deplatforming didn't work, why is the CBS 60 Minutes special being pulled? Why does the US have such an elaborate and far reaching network of financial sanctions, and corresponding anti-BDS laws trying to prevent private organizations from maintaining sanctions of their own? Why do most platforms and payment providers deplatform adult content? And so on. (The article appears to complain that the John Birch Society were wrongly deplatformed, if you want to know how far out the author is)
- ch4s3 10mo ago
  Did you read the article or are you responding to the headline?
  - pjc50 10mo ago
    I read it enough to get to the defense of Bircherism.
    - j16sdiz 10mo ago
      Removing Trump from Twitter didn't stop people from voting him. Removing 60 Minutes from CBS doesn't stop people like you from on elsewhere. Instead, it fuel them to post elsewhere. Deplatforming didn't work, and deplatforming doesn't work now.
      - deleted 10mo ago
        [deleted]
      - pjc50 10mo ago
        What I'm saying is that this is a survivor effect: there are plenty of cases where deplatforming does work, it's just not 100% effective and so we have this situation like antibiotic resistance where pathologies have evolved around the defenses. It's kind of incredible that viruses have managed to evolve around vaccines to install a pro-virus person at the top of the US department of health to ensure better spread of viruses, but I guess life finds a way. Also: this is entirely anglocentric. I don't think you'd find anyone claiming that the Chinese government censorship system backfired or is completely ineffective. It's an even stronger system than billionaires over there.
josefritzishere 10mo ago
If anything, the federal government became even more aggressive in it's censorship efforts under the current administration. Banning individual words in federal reports and grantees publications, pressuring networks to fire program hosts, performatively lawsuits, threatening to pull broadcast licenses and now even censoring an individual CBS story. Things have distinctly escalated.
- ch4s3 10mo ago
  It doesn't seem like its working very well for them, and if anything polarize people further as the article suggests.
  - josefritzishere 10mo ago
    It does seem almost performative doesnt it? Censorship would be more effective if the machinations weren't so public.
dpark 10mo ago
It’s frustrating that this is flagged. I don’t agree with the article but I think there’s good context here for actual discussion.
- itsdrewmiller 10mo ago
  Perhaps hacker news isn't the right place for that discussion.
  - dpark 10mo ago
    HN seems like exactly the place for a discussion on the unintended effects of speech suppression on social media platforms.
silexia 10mo ago
@Dang - why is this flagged down, but the flags on the 60 minutes story were overriden?
- dang 10mo ago
  We occasionally turn off the flags on political/ideological stories when certain conditions are met, such as: (1) there aren't too many of them; (2) the story contains significant new information (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22significant%20new%20information%22%20by%3Adang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...); (3) there's some overlap with intellectual curiosity; (4) we think HN can maybe discuss it substantively; or last but not least, (5) the community is insisting on discussing it. The latter can show up in various ways, such as when the story keeps getting reposted (often from different URLs) or we get lots of emails about it. Political or ideological opinion pieces rarely meet any of these conditions. That doesn't mean they're bad articles, but it does mean we would reserve the turning-off-flags move (which ought to be fairly rare) for articles that do. Does that answer your question?
  - silexia 10mo ago
    Thank you for the explanation. As a long time community member, I have seen this principle and agree with it. I am asking how the principle applies to the 60 minutes story so that multiple articles were on the front page, despite all being flagged? This does not seem very relevant as the 60 minutes story was not even killed, but delayed to await additional investigation. Seems like it violates the numbers you mentioned 1), 3), and 4) and 5)?

34 points by sbuttgereit 10mo ago

n4r9 10mo ago

This article is predicated on an unfounded counterfactual. Who knows what would have happened if Trump's twitter account hadn't been banned? Also, it seems a bit off to describe Musk's leadership of Twitter as triggering the return of "the free and open internet".

BobSonOfBob 10mo ago
Funny, the Musk comment tripped me up as well. Since it is clear the Twitter algos and Grok are sycophantic. Yet … the article resonates with me. Deplatforming. Canceling. Suppressing. Has not worked. Moderation. Healthily engagement. Acknowledgement but not acceptance. Can that work?
- testdelacc1 10mo ago
  It resonates with people who aren’t personally affected by the Overton window shifting towards extremism. It’s now more normal to fling racist slurs at people online, and that behaviour is coming offline as well. When we used to “deplatform” racism this sort of talk wasn’t within the Overton window. Of course if you’re not personally affected you’ll say this is fine, marketplace of ideas etc. Let the marketplace sort out if racism should be normalised or not. It doesn’t even lead to better discourse. We’re both here, commenting on this forum right? It’s because the level of discourse here is higher than elsewhere, certainly much better than “free speech” platforms like Musk’s. How can that be, when HN has extraordinarily strict rules on acceptable speech? Even calling someone an idiot can get you banned here, let alone a pajeet or Paki. If you truly believed in freedom of speech, you’d quit a forum moderated like this.
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
ch4s3 10mo ago
> This article is predicated on an unfounded counterfactual. I think it's just evaluating the claim that removing these people from a public platform removes their ideas from popular discourse, which obviously didn't work. The article is arguing that failing to engage bad ideas head on leads to increasingly insular an polarized groups within society.
- n4r9 10mo ago
  > which obviously didn't work But... how obvious is that? Perhaps it did significantly reduce those ideas when it was active. Like, if Musk hadn't reinstated Trump's account we could be looking at a different presidency.
  - ch4s3 10mo ago
    Again you didn’t read the article. Read it or fuck off and stop arguing about the headline.
    - n4r9 10mo ago
      Yeah, I read the article. It doesn't address the possibility that the causality could be the other way around. The stuff about Trump and Bhattacharya is just odd. Trump rose back to power after Musk bought Twitter and gave him a platform to spread lies again. Then Trump appointed RFK, who appointed Bhattacharya as a sort of token gesture. The Fuentes stuff is just as odd - his popularity waned while he was censored, but after being reinstated to X he grew his base to a million followers. Again, how does this support the claim that deplatforming was a negative move? I guess there's two competing narratives: deplatforming never worked, vs deplatforming was working until Musk stepped in and undid it. The article does not give any compelling arguments for the former.
      - ch4s3 10mo ago
        Did you read it though ? The article is about negative polarization spirals. You keep missing that entirely.
vpShane 10mo ago
Agreed. The internet is a wild ride of walled garden algorithms, dead internet theory, bot comments with other bot comments, like farming, influenced sway-the-masses, scam laden AI generated nightmares with major platforms requiring IDs, biometric verifications where you're fingerprinted, scanned, identified and crapped on. Deplatforming removes a voice to a captive audience where one has entire lively hoods taken from them, their viewpoints suppressed and are forced to other platforms where the userbases are questionable offering their own infinite scrolls and dopamine hits and their own cancel cultures. It is what it is.

SanjayMehta 10mo ago

Sounds like deplatforming is a variant of the Streisand effect.

pjc50 10mo ago

If deplatforming didn't work, why is the CBS 60 Minutes special being pulled? Why does the US have such an elaborate and far reaching network of financial sanctions, and corresponding anti-BDS laws trying to prevent private organizations from maintaining sanctions of their own? Why do most platforms and payment providers deplatform adult content? And so on. (The article appears to complain that the John Birch Society were wrongly deplatformed, if you want to know how far out the author is)

ch4s3 10mo ago
Did you read the article or are you responding to the headline?
- pjc50 10mo ago
  I read it enough to get to the defense of Bircherism.
  - j16sdiz 10mo ago
    Removing Trump from Twitter didn't stop people from voting him. Removing 60 Minutes from CBS doesn't stop people like you from on elsewhere. Instead, it fuel them to post elsewhere. Deplatforming didn't work, and deplatforming doesn't work now.
    - deleted 10mo ago
      [deleted]
    - pjc50 10mo ago
      What I'm saying is that this is a survivor effect: there are plenty of cases where deplatforming does work, it's just not 100% effective and so we have this situation like antibiotic resistance where pathologies have evolved around the defenses. It's kind of incredible that viruses have managed to evolve around vaccines to install a pro-virus person at the top of the US department of health to ensure better spread of viruses, but I guess life finds a way. Also: this is entirely anglocentric. I don't think you'd find anyone claiming that the Chinese government censorship system backfired or is completely ineffective. It's an even stronger system than billionaires over there.

josefritzishere 10mo ago

If anything, the federal government became even more aggressive in it's censorship efforts under the current administration. Banning individual words in federal reports and grantees publications, pressuring networks to fire program hosts, performatively lawsuits, threatening to pull broadcast licenses and now even censoring an individual CBS story. Things have distinctly escalated.

ch4s3 10mo ago
It doesn't seem like its working very well for them, and if anything polarize people further as the article suggests.
- josefritzishere 10mo ago
  It does seem almost performative doesnt it? Censorship would be more effective if the machinations weren't so public.

dpark 10mo ago

It’s frustrating that this is flagged. I don’t agree with the article but I think there’s good context here for actual discussion.

itsdrewmiller 10mo ago
Perhaps hacker news isn't the right place for that discussion.
- dpark 10mo ago
  HN seems like exactly the place for a discussion on the unintended effects of speech suppression on social media platforms.

silexia 10mo ago

@Dang - why is this flagged down, but the flags on the 60 minutes story were overriden?

dang 10mo ago
We occasionally turn off the flags on political/ideological stories when certain conditions are met, such as: (1) there aren't too many of them; (2) the story contains significant new information (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22significant%20new%20information%22%20by%3Adang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...); (3) there's some overlap with intellectual curiosity; (4) we think HN can maybe discuss it substantively; or last but not least, (5) the community is insisting on discussing it. The latter can show up in various ways, such as when the story keeps getting reposted (often from different URLs) or we get lots of emails about it. Political or ideological opinion pieces rarely meet any of these conditions. That doesn't mean they're bad articles, but it does mean we would reserve the turning-off-flags move (which ought to be fairly rare) for articles that do. Does that answer your question?
- silexia 10mo ago
  Thank you for the explanation. As a long time community member, I have seen this principle and agree with it. I am asking how the principle applies to the 60 minutes story so that multiple articles were on the front page, despite all being flagged? This does not seem very relevant as the 60 minutes story was not even killed, but delayed to await additional investigation. Seems like it violates the numbers you mentioned 1), 3), and 4) and 5)?