[evgen]

Sorry to burst your bubble, but so far it has been rather clearly demonstrated that de-platforming works for diminishing interest and engagement with some of these more dangerous groups. It raises the bar for alternative systems, makes a casual redirect difficult (c.f. algorithmic push towards some of these groups due to perceived higher engagement/controversy), and generally puts the nutjobs into their own little echo chamber where we can watch them.

Must be a bitter pill to swallow, but you are simply wrong. There are few platforms that cannot be diminished, and the further out these groups are pushed the harder it becomes for them to maintain the interest of a large potential audience. While there is always a signup bump after big events (c.f. the parler and Gab bumps when some of the more egregiously intolerant Trump groups were dumped from reddit and other places) this never lasts and eventually the only group that remains on these sites is the core nucleus of nazi assholes that no one wanted in the first place.

[m-p-3]

Deplatforming, for the better or worse, is putting a bigger spotlight on decentralized platforms to mitigate the issue of hosting something that businesses are unwilling to touch. They'll always try to find a platform they can leech on that cannot be moderated as easily, because not one holds the keys to the kingdom.

I feel like that attempting to silence a group by deplatforming is similar to attempting to block/censor a service provided over the Internet, the network sees censorship as a system failure and it will always attempt to find a route around that.

[evgen]

> the network sees censorship as a system failure and it will always attempt to find a route around that

No, it really doesn't. John was wrong. What happens is that 'censorship' is applied at a particular level of the stack and this forces people who want to share or view the content to move to a more complicated and expensive process at a higher level of abstraction in the delivery stack. This is because decentralized systems are less efficient and because, so far, decentralized systems have incredibly shitty UX. You can shine a spotlight on decentralized alternatives and they may get a little bit of attention, but the attention will not last long enough to have a significant impact. The true believers may try to make the effort for a while, but they will slowly drift back to spending most of their time using the easiest possible mechanism and tool because they actually have other things to do with their time and life.