There is evidence that deplatforming works (https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/bjbp9d/do-social-...)
Defending free speech means defending those we disagree with, and maybe even hate.
People without platforms are still free to speak. If dang banned me from HN I could still go stand on the corner and read my posts aloud and no one would arrest me.
Free speech does not mean I'm entitled to someone else's platform.
You're thinking of the first amendment, there is a nuanced difference between that and the general principle of free speech.
I'll assume you happened to not be aware of this, but there are lots of people online who refuse to acknowledge that difference and continue to spout the "entitled to someone else's platform" persuasion meme, which is kind of what this whole discussion is about: power, or altering the course of future events. If one's ideas & principles are sound, disingenuously censoring opposing ideas shouldn't be necessary. I believe many pro-censorship people know this explicitly (but would never speak it out loud) and others "sense" it subconsciously.
Is the difference between the First Amendment and the moral principle of free speech really that nuanced?
It seems to me one has to be thinking strictly in terms of a single country, a single period of human history, a single document in order to conflate the First Amendment with the moral principle of freedom of speech. This is a very narrow view.
It depends if you're trying to win elections or internet arguments, or to ensure a healthy marketplace of diverse ideas exists, because that is the best way we know of to find the best solutions to problems. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube are where modern people "congregate" and get their "information". Cutting someone off of these platforms dramatically lowers the chances that anyone will hear them, that's the entire point of the action. Claims that dismiss this as no problem "because someone else's platform" are not just saying nothing illegal has happened, they are also essentially saying a free marketplace of ideas is not valuable. This is a very new development in western countries, and it's pretty easy to see how far gone most people are already, even on more intelligent forums like this. Partisan politics trump almost everything on certain topics, even one as important as this.
But if a platform wants to be a "common carrier" and not a publisher with all the responsibilities thereof, it doesn't get to make the distinction, so actually in a very real sense, you are entitled to use the platform of anyone who wants to be a common carrier, by definition.
If you send something controversial via USPS, they don't have any liability for it, and only in very exceptional circumstances would it be intercepted in transit. If they were responsible for everything they carried, the postal service would look very, very different. If it's illegal you can be busted at either end but the postal service itself doesn't care.
Am I being censored or deplatformed? ;-)
I'll see myself to the corner...
I understand that there's a different level of consequence we're talking about here (legal vs comment deletion) but how we treat child porn is the extreme for intolerance and I think it's safe to say child porn is less than it would be in the more "tolerant" alternative. And I actually do mean think, I don't have evidence, and I don't know, so if there's evidence otherwise that some society accepted child porn with the caveat of "this is bad" always being placed beside it and then saw it's usage and distribution drop I would find that pretty damn compelling case.
I would point to other comparables though. What causes a decrease in smoking? Did putting health warning labels on cigarette boxes decrease smoking? How did that compare to banning commercials and removing indoor smoking?
I think no one disagrees that it "works" insofar as it stops the bad person from getting their bad ideas out there. Opponents of deplatforming generally argue that the long-term reaction to the deplatforming is worse than the problem the bad person's ideas were causing. Better to counter the bad ideas with good ideas to do long term good.
Not just that the reaction is worse, that the deplatforming erodes the spirit of free speech. I believe free speech is an important part of democracy.
Nobody is listening to his ideas enough to give them underserved credibility.
I suppose it depends one what you goal with deplatforming is. If it's convincing people that the ideas that people like Alex Jones and organisations like Black Lives Matter (they're in the article as someone who have similarly been affected) are wrong or hateful then I think it will fail.
Consider the fact that deplatforming (primarily of right wing speakers) in the US became significantly more prevalent around 2014, and 2015. It didn't help in the 2016 election.
Gab itself has been deplatformed to a degree, Google and Apple banned their mobile apps and their DNS registrar threatened to yank their domain over certain user posts.
For example, despite what anyone thinks about what Trump says (I think he's an idiot and a clown), he does occasionally say something that isn't complete BS (please don't make me try to find such an example).
You just can't go down that route and expect a good outcome. In fact, I would argue that you're going to end up with the opposite result that you intended because you'll, inadvertently, end up giving more attention to idiotic ideas than the ideas actually deserve.