Platform bans of offensive influencers have been in the news a lot recently. While much conversation has focused on the ethics of deplatforming, the preceding questions about its effectiveness and what happens in its aftermath have remained under-explored.
To explore these questions, my team (@asbruckman, @Diyi_Yang and @ChristianBoyls1) and I examined 3 case studies of prominent deplatforming on Twitter - Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Owen Benjamin. We report on this work in an upcoming @ACM_CSCW paper #CSCW2021
Analyzing over 49M tweets and accounting for existing temporal trends, we found that deplatforming reduced not only the conversation about these influencers, but also the spread of many anti-social ideas and conspiracy theories (e.g., pizzagate, sandy hook).
Overall, deplatforming these 3 influencers also significantly declined the overall activity and toxicity levels of their thousands of supporters.
However, these bans increased the prevalence of some offensive ideas we tested and fired up a small group of supporters to become more active and toxic than before - this emphasizes the need for careful moderation in the aftermath of high-profile bans.
Check out my Medium blog that summarizes this paper here: medium.com/@shagunjhaver/…
For a brief video presentation about this work, see this: . Come ask me questions about this work during my presentation at @ACM_CSCW later this month.
Full details, including the paper preprint, are available on my webpage: shagunjhaver.com/research/artic…
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