Does Deplatforming Work? A quick survey of literature in the wake of the Capitol Hill Attack

 12 January 2021 

In the wake of events on Capitol Hill, social media and tech companies have banned Donald Trump (and in some cases his campaigns) from their platforms. Twitter has also taken down 70,000 accounts that mostly spread QAnon content. What will the impact of this be? Amarnath Amarasingam tweeted out a small literature review that looks at research on what happened when social media companies began to ban ISIS which has been compiled here (with Amar’s permission) for our audience:

Since 2015 researchers have been examining the effect of banning ISIS. Here are some of the insights below that may indicate the effect that banning Donald Trump from social media on his followers.

Takedowns of Daesh Accounts:

One of the earliest studies that discussed the impact of suspensions of ISIS accounts was completed by J.M. Berger (@intelwire) and Morgan, The ISIS Twitter Consensus. They found that suspensions did have an impact on replies and retweets and overall dissemination. After the suspensions of certain nodes, 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”.

On the specific question of how suspensions influence a Twitter network, see this piece by Berger and Heather Perez (@IntelGirl111), The Islamic State’s Diminishing Returns on Twitter, which explores how suspensions impact these groups, including major disruptions to dissemination and decline in follower count. 

Another study by Audrey Alexander (@Aud_Alexander), Digital Decay, similarly found that ISIS supporters were finding it hard to “gain traction” after Twitter took a harder stance on the group. 

This study by Maura Conway (@galwaygrrl) and colleagues, Disrupting Daesh, seeks to measure the impact of takedowns on things like community breakdown.

Takedowns of Far-Right Extremist Networks:

For far-right specific research, Berger published this piece in Vox, The Alt-Right Twitter Census,

in 2018, and noted that suspensions of far-right accounts were leading to migration to platforms like Gab.

Another important study by Eshwar Chandrasekharan and others, You Can’t Stay Here, 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.”

On the differences between how social media companies deal with jihadist groups versus the far-right, and why dealing with the latter is a challenge, see Conway, Routing the Extreme Right.

What is an “online community?”

One of my scholarly interests is the notion of “online community”. You can read my thoughts in this piece, What Twitter Really Means for Islamic State Supporters. I argue that ISIS supporters receive social and emotional benefits from being part of an online community.

Elizabeth Pearson (@lizzypearson) has also discussed this issue in her piece, Wilayat Twitter and the Battle Against Islamic State’s Twitter Jihad. She argues that suspensions can become incorporated in the online identities of online extremists in their “twitter lives” around which community and identity are fostered. The groups can build suspension into their online lives. This blog post is based on her 2017 study, Online as the New Frontline, on how suspensions can reinforce community.

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. 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.

And finally, with bizarre timing, Shiraz Maher (@ShirazMaher), Charlie Winter (@charliewinter) and myself just published a piece, How Telegram Disruption Impacts Jihadist Platform Migration, 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.

 Richard Rogers has a piece, Deplatforming: Following extreme Internet celebrities to Telegram and alternative social media, which finds that far-right “celebrities” “[b]eing cancelled by Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and/or YouTube has stark consequences for the maintenance of a fan base, following and revenue stream, as has been reported. Migrating to alternative social media may not offer as much.”

I’ll finish with a piece, Crossroads: Counter-terrorism and the Internet, that I return to often. By Facebook’s Brian Fishman (@brianfishman) it covers a lot of ground that touches on everything you want to know about extremists on social media from the perspective of someone who works in the industry but also has strong scholarly credentials. He also has a mic-drop paragraph, which I try to remember in my own work:

This piece was edited by Stephanie Carvin