Deplatforming Backfired
reason.com
reason.com
(The article appears to complain that the John Birch Society were wrongly deplatformed, if you want to know how far out the author is)
Removing 60 Minutes from CBS doesn't stop people like you from on elsewhere.
Instead, it fuel them to post elsewhere.
Deplatforming didn't work, and deplatforming doesn't work now.
Also: this is entirely anglocentric. I don't think you'd find anyone claiming that the Chinese government censorship system backfired or is completely ineffective. It's an even stronger system than billionaires over there.
You have completely missed the point of the article. So you didn't actually read the article and you're making a dumb claim based on a misunderstanding.
That doesn't work very well either. There are countless examples like the anti-vax nonsense.
I'll agree with the statement that deplatforming doesn't work very well. But it could work better than the alternatives in some cases.
Then you haven’t looked. There are endless examples of qualified people explaining the actual risks and benefits of vaccines in clear and honest terms.
Perhaps what you actually mean is that you don’t see this happen within the insular communities that embrace antivaccine rhetoric. You don’t see it there because such efforts are blocked. Go explain vaccines in an antivax subreddit and watch as you get downvoted into invisibility and probably banned from the sub.
See, deplatforming works!
(like any tactic, it can be used for good or evil)
Again that's not what the article here that you didn't read is talking about. The article is about negative polarization and preference falsification.
Yes there's plenty of that in some places, like tiktok or the NYT. I mean that people need to actually address it in places where people who are engaging in anti-vaxx content will see it and engage with it. There was a successful example a few years back where public health officials engaged with Chabad community leaders in Brooklyn and got them to encourage everyone to get measles vaccines, but it think this is all too rare.
From what I’ve seen there is a lot of effort placed on trying to reach out and correct these misplaced views (or at least there was under the previous administration). You are saying that the issue is that outreach is not being attempted when in fact it is.
> Chabad community leaders in Brooklyn
Was this a case of actual vaccine hesitancy? Most of the antivax stuff is not mere hesitancy but hostility. If you have an audience willing to listen you can potentially sway them. An audience who refuses to listen and assumes you are an evil liar is hard to work with.
> actually address it in places where people who are engaging in anti-vaxx content
And I explained why this is so difficult. Internet echo chambers are a huge source of this stuff and it’s extremely hard to pierce because participants actively block participants who dissent.
Political or ideological opinion pieces rarely meet any of these conditions. That doesn't mean they're bad articles, but it does mean we would reserve the turning-off-flags move (which ought to be fairly rare) for articles that do.
Does that answer your question?
It doesn’t even lead to better discourse. We’re both here, commenting on this forum right? It’s because the level of discourse here is higher than elsewhere, certainly much better than “free speech” platforms like Musk’s. How can that be, when HN has extraordinarily strict rules on acceptable speech? Even calling someone an idiot can get you banned here, let alone a pajeet or Paki. If you truly believed in freedom of speech, you’d quit a forum moderated like this.
I think it's just evaluating the claim that removing these people from a public platform removes their ideas from popular discourse, which obviously didn't work. The article is arguing that failing to engage bad ideas head on leads to increasingly insular an polarized groups within society.
But... how obvious is that? Perhaps it did significantly reduce those ideas when it was active. Like, if Musk hadn't reinstated Trump's account we could be looking at a different presidency.
The stuff about Trump and Bhattacharya is just odd. Trump rose back to power after Musk bought Twitter and gave him a platform to spread lies again. Then Trump appointed RFK, who appointed Bhattacharya as a sort of token gesture.
The Fuentes stuff is just as odd - his popularity waned while he was censored, but after being reinstated to X he grew his base to a million followers. Again, how does this support the claim that deplatforming was a negative move?
I guess there's two competing narratives: deplatforming never worked, vs deplatforming was working until Musk stepped in and undid it. The article does not give any compelling arguments for the former.
Deplatforming removes a voice to a captive audience where one has entire lively hoods taken from them, their viewpoints suppressed and are forced to other platforms where the userbases are questionable offering their own infinite scrolls and dopamine hits and their own cancel cultures.
It is what it is.