[mlyle]

I do worry about the consequences of Twitter, Reddit, et al banning the more marginal content, though.

When The_Donald was on reddit, it was more easily monitored in one place. People who used it at least were forced to confront evidence daily that they weren't holding the majority opinion. And grownups from the platform could remove (and report to LE) the worst stuff.

When you ban those people from mainstream platforms, you do deny them some of an audience. But you also encourage them to make their own echo chambers and congregate elsewhere, which may be on the balance worse.

Now we see the same things happening with Twitter / Parler and Gab.

It's definitely hard to know where to draw the line. Karl Popper and all that.

[IfOnlyYouKnew]

FWIW, I've almost never seen this argument made by people who aren't secretly or openly supporting those who are banned (you being the exception here).

I believe there's quite a bit of data now that shows that deplatforming tends to work. I have forgotten all the names, but someone named "Milo" seems relevant, and wasn't Alex Jones also banned from somewhere and lost a lot of influence since?

And those are the cases where bans would tend to fail, i. e. people that had years to grow a loyal fan base, collect names & emails, etc. If it works in those cases, it should be extremely powerful when being used a bit more proactive. Anybody watching /r/thed... would have known it's toxic two weeks in, before it had time to spiral entirely out of control.

[mlyle]

I think that maybe, if you ban really early, you can interrupt some of the badness--- but this is also the time it's hardest to justify quelling speech.

But by the point they have a large community together, they'll go somewhere else and be worse. Better would be to constantly prune off the worst bits of the community that are most over the line rather than purging all at once (which guarantees a migration).

It's hard to disentangle what the exact causes are, but it sure seems like the discourse has gotten even worse over the past couple of years even as these types of deplatforming choices have been made.

e.g. thedonald.win is infinitely worse than /r/TheDonald was.

I do also worry a bit about a few powerful parties becoming intermediaries to communication (Twitter, Facebook) and imposing their own standards, too. Right now the choices being made are relatively benign, but will they always be?

Once you have an isolated pile of mostly violent extremists with no content control-- go ahead and censor away, though.

[bitstan]

FWIW I only discovered reddit because I was "deplatformed" from Digg due to sharing the image below.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controvers...

Can't be the only one. Reddit was a libertarian cesspool at the time, a crime for sure. RIP Mr.Swartz <3