Deplatforming Backfired

[pjc50]

If deplatforming didn't work, why is the CBS 60 Minutes special being pulled? Why does the US have such an elaborate and far reaching network of financial sanctions, and corresponding anti-BDS laws trying to prevent private organizations from maintaining sanctions of their own? Why do most platforms and payment providers deplatform adult content? And so on.

(The article appears to complain that the John Birch Society were wrongly deplatformed, if you want to know how far out the author is)

[1123581321]

The thesis of the article would mean that if people are not allowed to express the views in the 60 Minutes story, it would create an opportunity for an ungated, stronger expression of those views in the future.

[ch4s3]

Did you read the article or are you responding to the headline?

[dpark]

It’s frustrating that this is flagged. I don’t agree with the article but I think there’s good context here for actual discussion.

[itsdrewmiller]

Perhaps hacker news isn't the right place for that discussion.

[josefritzishere]

If anything, the federal government became even more aggressive in it's censorship efforts under the current administration. Banning individual words in federal reports and grantees publications, pressuring networks to fire program hosts, performatively lawsuits, threatening to pull broadcast licenses and now even censoring an individual CBS story. Things have distinctly escalated.

[ch4s3]

It doesn't seem like its working very well for them, and if anything polarize people further as the article suggests.

[silexia]

@Dang - why is this flagged down, but the flags on the 60 minutes story were overriden?

[dang]

We occasionally turn off the flags on political/ideological stories when certain conditions are met, such as: (1) there aren't too many of them; (2) the story contains significant new information (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...); (3) there's some overlap with intellectual curiosity; (4) we think HN can maybe discuss it substantively; or last but not least, (5) the community is insisting on discussing it. The latter can show up in various ways, such as when the story keeps getting reposted (often from different URLs) or we get lots of emails about it.

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?

[SanjayMehta]

Sounds like deplatforming is a variant of the Streisand effect.

[n4r9]

This article is predicated on an unfounded counterfactual. Who knows what would have happened if Trump's twitter account hadn't been banned? Also, it seems a bit off to describe Musk's leadership of Twitter as triggering the return of "the free and open internet".

[ch4s3]

> This article is predicated on an unfounded counterfactual.

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.

[BobSonOfBob]

Funny, the Musk comment tripped me up as well. Since it is clear the Twitter algos and Grok are sycophantic. Yet … the article resonates with me. Deplatforming. Canceling. Suppressing. Has not worked. Moderation. Healthily engagement. Acknowledgement but not acceptance. Can that work?

[vpShane]

Agreed. The internet is a wild ride of walled garden algorithms, dead internet theory, bot comments with other bot comments, like farming, influenced sway-the-masses, scam laden AI generated nightmares with major platforms requiring IDs, biometric verifications where you're fingerprinted, scanned, identified and crapped on.

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.