Anti-semitic speech has traditionally relied on soap boxes to spread their message, for decades before the internet even existed. That's why most academics won't engage them, because these groups are not interested in genuine discussion but in broadcasting their prejudice.
The alt-right or alt-left is a tiny group. An entire party is 35-50% of the population. Rep or Dem.
If you want the data, check out these studies from the quoted researchers:
1: http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf 2: https://datasociety.net/output/oxygen-of-amplification/
Neither of those sources demonstrate that banning “alt-right” content “works” unless you mean that banning results in bans.
> r/CoonTown was a racist subreddit dedicated to violent hate speech against African Americans. It contained “a buffet of crude jokes and racial slurs, complaints about the liberal media, links to news stories that highlight black-on-white crime or Confederate pride, and discussions of black people appropriating white culture” [28]. Their banner featured a cartoon of a black man hanging, with a Klansman in the background [20]. It had over 20,000 subscribers at the time of banning.3 The following is a representative, highly-upvoted comment from the subreddit:
> “It would be so much easier if this [n-word] was taken outside and shot. Then rasslle up his eight or nine [kids] and shoot them so we can terminate that line of genes.”
And from the abstract:
> We find that the ban worked for Reddit. More accounts than expected discontinued using the site; those that stayed drastically decreased their hate speech usage—by at least 80%.
Would you like to try again?
And yes, it borders on the tautology I pointed out before - banning content results in banned content. This fails to address the question: is banning content a good idea?
> 1.2 Research Questions & Findings > We analyze the effects of the ban at two levels: the user level and the community level.
> RQ1: What effect did Reddit’s ban have on the contributors to banned subreddits?
> RQ1a: How were their activity levels affected?
> RQ1b: How did their hate speech usage change, if at all?
> RQ2: What effect did the ban have on subreddits that saw an influx of banned subreddit users?
> RQ2a: To which subreddits did the contributors to banned subreddits migrate after the ban?
> RQ2b: How did hate speech usage by migrants change in these subreddits, if at all?
> RQ2c: How did hate speech usage by preexisting users change in these subreddits, if at all?
>And yes, it borders on the tautology
It's the study of the before-and-after effects of banning two subreddits, particularly on users of those subreddits as they migrated to others. Where is the tautology?
> that does not generalize to reasonable public policy.
The second paper, from the person you Ad Hominem described as "some woman’s opinion on how people should write about Internet-related news," directly talks about how you can generalize these ideas into combatting attacks on the Internet to prevent their amplification.
EDIT: That "some woman": Whitney Phillips; PhD 2012, English with an emphasis on folklore, University of Oregon
Would you like to try again?
If VICE is trash, then it should be easy to point out where the article is wrong, right? Which studies did you disagree with?
What about Tech Crunch [1]? Mashable [2]?
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/11/study-finds-reddits-contro...
[2] https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/594kq5/alex-jones...
Yes, although there is no need to defend my opinion every time after having bothered to read this kind of junk often enough. And the well is already poisoned by past articles.
The trashy VICE article has a broad claim in its headline that suggests (and is used to claim by the post here) that deplatforming works as a general tool against alt-right hate speech. The study itself only found that within a few weeks of shutting down certain subreddits, hate speech in a few other subreddits did not compensate. They did not investigate whether the hate speech went to other platforms, decreased in general or even increased due to radicalization from this. Nor did it examine long-term effects. And to be honest, it's not particularly convincing since it's heavy on ideology (example: "These constitute our invaded subreddits. Using this method, we identify 1201 subreddits invaded by r/fatpeoplehate migrants and 275 subreddits invaded by r/CoonTown migrants.").
Without deplatforming, the situation would be far worse. With a better economy, the situation would be far better.
You're in a sinking ship, and there's a few people desperately using bailing buckets to get water out. You point at the bucket brigade, and say: "You are the reason the ship is sinking."
No, they are the reason the ship hasn't sunk, yet.
(I'm not saying it's not. Read Andrew Yang's The War on Normal People for a superb analysis of how we're talking about the wrong things, economically.)