HOW DEPLATFORMING WORKS

In 2016, alt-right personality Milo Yiannopoulos had more than 300,000 Twitter followers and commanded huge speaking fees at college campuses across the country. As one of the main instigators of GamerGate, Yiannopoulos used his platform to launch harassment campaigns against members of marginalized communities. As of January 2021, his remaining social media platform is a Telegram channel with 23,000 subscribers. His reach has been reduced by more than 90%, and today, he’s a marginal figure, even on the far-right.

That’s the power of deplatforming.

Hatred spreads like a social virus. When hateful groups are allowed a platform, three things happen.

First, they push slyly-repackaged versions of their hateful ideas in less extreme and more mainstream spaces, convincing broad swaths of people to be just a little more racist, just a little more tolerant of their bigotry. Second, they recruit more members who are likely to get together and commit violence. When they do this successfully for long enough, societies start to change into places where discrimination, segregation and even genocide become acceptable. Lastly, those exposed to this hate are driven to violent action, such the 2018 Tree of Life massacre, when a user of the far-right social network Gab murdered eleven people and injured six more at a Pittsburgh synagogue.

When you get rid of a source of hateful rhetoric, the virus can’t spread. Deplatforming serves as an innoculation against that virus.

Deplatforming means denying extremists a platform to organize, spread their ideas, and recruit. Most companies have policies against their services being used for hatred and violence. We find where hateful groups are organizing: where they stay when they travel to hold violent rallies, where they broadcast their propaganda online, what payment services they use to fund their bigotry. Then we pressure those companies into upholding their terms of service.

One of the main arguments bigots make against deplatforming is that it violates their free speech rights. This isn’t true. In a legal sense, deplatforming doesn’t violate anyone’s free speech rights. Companies are free to do–or not do– business with whoever they want. There’s no law against refusing service to bigots. Likewise, the First Amendment protects peoples’ right to free speech from being infringed by the government. It doesn’t entitle anyone to a mass audience.

Hate groups are free to shout what they want on the street, and the government can’t legally stop them. But that doesn’t give them free reign to do and say what they want. As anti-racist activist Daryle Lamont Jenkins says, “Hate has consequences.”