No Easy Way Out: the Effectiveness of Deplatforming an Extremist Forum to Suppress Hate and Harassment

Abstract

Legislators and policymakers worldwide are debating options for suppressing illegal, harmful and undesirable material online. Drawing on several quantitative data sources, we show that deplatforming an active community to suppress online hate and harassment, even with a substantial concerted effort involving several tech firms, can be hard. Our case study is the disruption of the largest and longest-running harassment forum Kiwi Farms in late 2022, which is probably the most extensive industry effort to date. Despite the active participation of a number of tech companies over several consecutive months, this campaign failed to shut down the forum and remove its objectionable content. While briefly raising public awareness, it led to rapid platform displacement and traffic fragmentation. Part of the activity decamped to Telegram, while traffic shifted from the primary domain to previously abandoned alternatives. The forum experienced intermittent outages for several weeks, after which the community leading the campaign lost interest, traffic was directed back to the main domain, users quickly returned, and the forum was back online and became even more connected. The forum members themselves stopped discussing the incident shortly thereafter, and the net effect was that forum activity, active users, threads, posts and traffic were all cut by about half. Deplatforming a community without a court order raises philosophical issues about censorship versus free speech; ethical and legal issues about the role of industry in online content moderation; and practical issues on the efficacy of private-sector versus government action. Deplatforming a dispersed community using a series of court orders against individual service providers appears unlikely to be very effective if the censor cannot incapacitate the key maintainers, whether by arresting them, enjoining them or otherwise deterring them.