Amarnath Amarasingam Profile picture
Jan 10, 2021 18 tweets 6 min read Read on X
1. (THREAD) So, it seems like the deplatforming debate is once again kicking off, so I thought I would introduce some of the earlier work that was done in this area back when ISIS was buck wild on social media. What have we learned over the last six years might be useful today:
2. One of the earliest studies that discussed the impact of suspensions of ISIS accounts was @intelwire and Morgan's piece: The ISIS Twitter Consensus.

They found that suspensions did have an impact on replies and retweets and overall dissemination. brookings.edu/wp-content/upl…
3. After suspensions, the die-hard supporters dedicated themselves to creating new accounts, but others whittled away: “it appears the pace of account creation has lagged behind the pace of suspensions”
4. On the specific question of how suspensions impact the Twitter network, see this piece by @intelwire and @IntelGirl111, which explores how suspensions impact these groups, including major disruptions to dissemination and decline in follower count: extremism.gwu.edu/sites/g/files/…
5. Another study by @Aud_Alexander similarly found that ISIS supporters were finding it hard to “gain traction” after Twitter took a harder stance on the group. extremism.gwu.edu/sites/g/files/…
6. Yet another study (I told you we’ve been talking about this for a while) is by @galwaygrrl and colleagues, which specifically seeks to measure the impact of takedowns on things like community breakdown: researchgate.net/publication/31…
7. Quick interlude: a piece I return to often. By Facebook’s @brianfishman. Hard to summarize in a tweet, but it is a superb piece touching on everything you want to know. He also has a mic-drop paragraph, which I try to remember in my own work: tnsr.org/2019/02/crossr…
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8. For far-right specific research, there some stuff I would recommend as well: @intelwire published this in 2018, and noted that suspensions of far-right accounts were leading to migration to platforms like Gab. voxpol.eu/download/vox-p…
9. Another important study looks at the 2015 ban on several hateful subreddits. The study found “Through the banning of subreddits which engaged in racism and fat-shaming, Reddit was able to reduce the prevalence of such behavior on the site.” comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-…
10. On the differences between how social media companies deal with jihadist groups versus the far-right, see @galwaygrrl: tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.108…
11. One thing I want to end with is a kind of obsession of mine: the notion of “online community”.

You can read my thoughts on the Islamic State’s online community here:

Elizabeth pearson has also discussed this issue here: warontherocks.com/2015/12/what-t…
voxpol.eu/wilayat-twitte…
12. Much of this is also true for the far-right. They get immense amount of social and psychological benefits from being connected to like-minded people. Disrupting these networks is ultimately a good thing, but we need to think about how it impacts them and how they may respond
13. For individuals who receive an enormous amount of meaning and purpose from being a movement leader in the online space, having that disappear overnight could have unpredictable impact. One such case I’ve written about before: nationalpost.com/news/canada/wh…
14. And finally, with bizarre timing, we just published a piece on how ISIS supporters reacted to a major online campaign against them in November 2019. It seems we may be going through a similar watershed moment for the far-right today.
15/15. If I forgot any pertinent pieces on deplatforming, do post them here.
16/16. One piece I forgot to add on how suspensions can actually reinforce online community is this one by @lizzypearson. Well worth your time. tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…
Attaching this here to keep everything organized. lol

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More from @AmarAmarasingam

May 9, 2023
1. On the Texas shooter. I understand everyone jumped on the "he's a Nazi" train, because those on the right tried to claim someone with a name like Mauricio Garcia couldn't be a white nationalist, but I think in this politicized back and forth, some other analysis was lost.
2. To be clear, dude is absolutely a Nazi. But, having spent last night combing through his online profile and diary, I'm more interested in the role that far-right hyper masculinity is playing for him.
3. All of his posts going back several years are littered with not only misogynistic content, but explicit Incel terminology. His loneliness literally jumps off the page. As the years go by, you can see the attraction to Nazis arrive to kind of soothe his Inceldom.
Read 6 tweets
Feb 14, 2022
1. Thread on populism and the trucker convoy incoming!

My conversations over the last two weeks have gone something like this:

“Amar, what's this thing?
“A populist movement”
“But what do they believe?”
“It’s a populist movement”
“What do they want?”
“It’s a populist movement"
2. This leads me to believe that a quick primer on populism might be useful.

I should note that everything I know about populism comes from research done by Cristobal Rovira Kaltwasser, the late Magaret Canovan, @CasMudde and others. You should read their stuff.
3. From the beginning of the convoy, I’ve been calling it a kind of “maturing” of populism in Canada. We’ve seen this before, but the scale is quite different this time.
Read 20 tweets
Jan 20, 2022
1. So some quick thoughts on that Jordan Peterson op-ed, because I know some of you are going to fall for his argument.

I agree overall that merit and equity need to be better balanced, but I can't think of a worse person to have this conversation with than Jordan Peterson.
2. Look, I'll be the first to agree that "fill out a form online to show us you've thought about intersectionality" isn't the solution that some institutions think it is. They just haven't thought of anything better.
3. The problem with some of these critics (like Peterson's op-ed and George Will before him), is that they point to these annoying examples (which everyone agrees is dumb) and then try to dismiss the need for equity altogether.
Read 8 tweets

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