Important links

• Paper (preprint)
• ACM Digital Library link
• Medium Blog that summarizes this paper
• Poster
• Video presentation
• Slides
• Reddit discussion of this paper that reached the site’s front page

Media coverage

• Matthew Rozsa, “Twitter is actually doing a (relatively) good job limiting right-wing misinformation, study finds, Salon, October 27, 2021
• Megan Schumann, “Permanent Twitter Ban of Extremist Influencers Can Detoxify Social Media,” Rutgers News, October 21, 2021
• Jason Murdock, “Twitter Under Pressure Over ‘Double Standards’ After Donald Trump, MAGA Crackdown,” NewsWeek, January 15, 2021

Abstract

Deplatforming refers to the permanent ban of controversial public figures with large followings on social media sites. In recent years, platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have deplatformed many offensive influencers to curb the spread of offensive speech. We present a case study of three high-profile influencers who were deplatformed on Twitter—Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Owen Benjamin. Working with over 49M tweets, we found that deplatforming significantly reduced the number of conversations about all three influencers on Twitter. Further, analyzing the Twitter-wide activity of these influencers’ supporters, we show that the overall activity and toxicity levels of supporters declined after deplatforming. We contribute a methodological framework to systematically examine the effectiveness of moderation interventions and discuss broader implications of using deplatforming as a moderation strategy.

BibTeX citation

@article{jhaver2021deplatforming,
    author = {Jhaver, Shagun and Boylston, Christian and Yang, Diyi and Bruckman, Amy},
    title = {Evaluating the Effectiveness of Deplatforming as a Moderation Strategy on Twitter},
    year = {2021},
    issue_date = {October 2021},
    publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
    address = {New York, NY, USA},
    volume = {5},
    number = {CSCW2},
    url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3479525},
    doi = {10.1145/3479525},
    journal = {Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact.},
    month = {oct},
    articleno = {381},
    numpages = {30},
}