[dmix]

So you think people who engaged in fringe ideologies will be slowed down by having likeminded people banned and deplatformed from popular social media and chan forums? And not instead just pushing them further and further into their ideological bubbles (complete with a new self-fulfilled victim complex) on platforms where they are the only ones and they get to police their own wrongthink?

Even ISIS seemed to have an extensive social media identity despite countless attempts to prevent them from having any platform. Which included plenty of DDOS'ing too.

I’m sure some level of banning and administration makes sense on content sites (not so sure about DNS/WAF hosts) but I’m curious at what point it becomes “feel good” slacktivism while these guys just hop onto the next forum.

[sagichmal]

> So you think people who engaged in fringe ideologies will be slowed down by having likeminded people banned and deplatformed from popular social media and chan forums?

Yep!

And, more importantly, by making it even marginally harder to find this shit online, we can dramatically decrease the number of people who get exposed to, and radicalized by, it.

[dmix]

This is assuming it's not still on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and whatever other chans are left.

[sagichmal]

This is allowing perfection to be the enemy of the good. It's not necessary for an action to completely solve a problem to make it worth doing, it's OK if the action just helps.

[anigbrowl]

Yeah, absolutely. It's a numbers game, just the same as bombing your opponent's barracks or airfields in a conventional war. It doesn't wipe out their capacity but it degrades their infrastructure and communications.

I’m sure some level of banning and administration makes sense on content sites (not so sure about DNS/WAF hosts) but I’m curious at what point it becomes “feel good” slacktivism while these guys just hop onto the next forum.

They do, but it's not a smooth transition and sudden forced migration presents an infiltration opportunity because there's an avalanche of new user IDs with no way to verify them. Of course there are ways around this, like challenge/response phrases, callbacks to famous threads that people would remember, user IDs that can be checked back against contemporary screenshots etc., but it's pretty leaky.