Opinion Deplatforming hate forums doesn't work, British boffins warn - Industry intervention alone can't deal with harassment

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Depriving online hate groups of network services - otherwise known as deplatforming - doesn't work very well, according to boffins based in the United Kingdom.

In a recently released preprint paper, Anh Vu, Alice Hutchings, and Ross Anderson, from the University of Cambridge and the University of Edinburgh, examine efforts to disrupt harassment forum Kiwi Farms and find that community and industry interventions have been largely ineffective.

Their study, undertaken as lawmakers around the world are considering policies that aspire to moderate unlawful or undesirable online behavior, reveals that deplatforming has only a modest impact and those running harmful sites remain free to carry on harassing people through other services.

"Deplatforming users may reduce activity and toxicity levels of relevant actors on Twitter and Reddit, limit the spread of conspiratorial disinformation on Facebook, and minimize disinformation and extreme speech on YouTube," they write in their paper. "But deplatforming has often made hate groups and individuals even more extreme, toxic and radicalized."

As examples, they cite how Reddit's ban of r/incels in November 2017 led to the creation of two incel domains, which then grew rapidly. They also point to how users banned from Twitter and Reddit "exhibit higher levels of toxicity when migrating to Gab," among other similar situations.

The researchers focus on the deplatforming of Kiwi Farms, an online forum where users participate in efforts to harass prominent online figures. One such person was a Canadian transgender streamer known as @Keffals on Twitter and Twitch.

In early August last year, a Kiwi Farms forum member allegedly sent a malicious warning to police in London, Ontario, claiming that @Keffals had committed murder and was planning further violence, which resulted in her being "swatted - a form of attack that has proved lethal in some cases.

Following further doxxing, threats, and harassment, @Keffals organized a successful campaign to pressure Cloudflare to stop providing Kiwi Farms with reverse proxy security protection, which helped the forum defend against denial-of-service attacks.

The research paper outlines the various interventions taken by internet companies against Kiwi Farms. After Cloudflare dropped Kiwi Farms on September 3 last year, DDoS-Guard did so two days later. The following day, the Internet Archive and hCaptcha severed ties.

On September 10, the kiwifarms.is domain stopped working. Five days later, security firm DiamWall suspended service for those operating the site.

On September 18, all the domains used by the forum became inaccessible, possibly related to an alleged data breach. But then, as the researchers observe, the Kiwi Farms dark web forum was back by September 29. There were further intermittent outages on October 9 and October 22, but since then Kiwi Farms has been active, apart from brief service interruptions.

"The disruption was more effective than previous DDoS attacks on the forum, as observed from our datasets. Yet the impact, although considerable, was short-lived." the researchers state.

"While part of the activity was shifted to Telegram, half of the core members returned quickly after the forum recovered. And while most casual users were shaken off, others turned up to replace them. Cutting forum activity and users by half might be a success if the goal of the campaign is just to hurt the forum, but if the objective was to 'drop the forum,' it has failed."

Hate is difficult to shift

One reason for the durability of such sites, the authors suggest, is that activists get bored and move on, while trolls are motivated to endure and survive. They argue that deplatforming doesn't look like a long-term solution because, while casual harassment forum participants may scatter, core members become more determined and can recruit replacements through the publicity arising from censorship.

Vu, Hutchings, and Anderson argue that deplatforming by itself is insufficient and needs to be done in the context of a legal regime that can enforce compliance. Unfortunately, they note, this framework doesn't currently exist.

"We believe the harms and threats associated with online hate communities may justify action despite the right to free speech," the authors conclude. "But within the framework of the EU and the Council of Europe which is based on the European Convention on Human Rights, such action will have to be justified as proportionate, necessary and in accordance with the law."

They also contend that police work needs to be paired with social work, specifically education and psycho-social support, to deprogram hate among participants in such forums.

"There are multiple research programs and field experiments on effective ways to detox young men from misogynistic attitudes, whether in youth clubs and other small groups, at the scale of schools, or even by gamifying the identification of propaganda that promotes hate," they argue. "But most countries still lack a unifying strategy for violence reduction." ®
 
They also contend that police work needs to be paired with social work, specifically education and psycho-social support, to deprogram hate among participants in such forums.

Fix my lying eyes with brainwashing.

Actually from the end of the article it's clear they think we are all basement dwelling, teenage incel edgelords.
 
I would love to ask these researchers what they think about the constant erasure of peoples past crimes on the internet, and the fact that KF keeps receipts on them. Perhaps I’d quote 1984 at them:
Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.
I’d ask them if they felt that was relevant to this forum? And whether they feel that they’re being used as attack dogs to remove a source of archiving of genuinely bad and often criminal behaviour, or simply socially unacceptable behaviour, on the web. If they accept that premise, who might this benefit?
We live in a time where someone keeping a record of say, efforts to lower the age of consent or mutilate children legally is a threat. To whom? Who does their work actually benefit? Do they think anyone in power gives a single toss about people laughing at unimportant idiots on the web, or do they care about something else that the farms does? Keep a record of behaviour, often government or official behaviour?
Are YOU the baddies perhaps? What will your work be used for? The answer is closing down free speech and freedom of expression online, so well done.
 
Fix my lying eyes with brainwashing.

Actually from the end of the article it's clear they think we are all basement dwelling, teenage incel edgelords.
There was a time when The Register would have snarked this "paper" into the dirt. Unfortunately, I can only partly blame its current attitude on its assimilation by a California publishing house.
 
Following further doxxing, threats, and harassment, @Keffals organized a successful campaign to pressure Cloudflare to stop providing Kiwi Farms
Organised a campaign? You mean "threw a diva-level hissy fit and did everything in their power to stop thousands of users enjoying a forum?
is that activists get bored and move on, while trolls are motivated to endure and survive.
Trannies give up easily and have no principals, while Chads stick to their morals and value systems.

Imagine getting paid to study kiwifarms
 
I wonder if it’s changed their minds on any issue at all? If the abyss has stared back? I’d be interested to see which threads or boards they concentrated on.
It probably hasn't changed their mind, at least according to this article based on the study. The language used makes it sound like they were bias entering the study and nothing has changed.

This is no more a hate site than reddit or Facebook. Try praising trump or questioning the coof on there and you'll receive more hatred than anyone would on here.
 
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Of course its a Soy.
You and I have very different definitions of hate, faggot.
 
Amazing. They are just now figuring out what autists have been discussing since before 2016. Censoring discussion only drives it underground and the mere fact of the censorship adds legitimacy to the message.

The fact of the matter is, these dipshits are not operating with objective truth on their side, which is why their memes will always be cringe, their shills will always be ineffective and their agents will always stick out like a sore thumb.

hardworkingfbi.png
 
Always weird to see people describe conducting illegal cyber attacks in such a sanitized way that you'd think they were entirely legal.
Hmmm yes, what keffals did was illegal, was it not? DDOS ing a site is very naughty. Sending hormones to minors isn’t legal either.
And we are the bad guys. Very interesting yes.
Amazing. They are just now figuring out what autists have been discussing since before 2016. Censoring discussion only drives it underground and the mere fact of the censorship adds legitimacy to the message.

The fact of the matter is, these dipshits are not operating with objective truth on their side, which is why their memes will always be cringe, their shills will always be ineffective and their agents will always stick out like a sore thumb.

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I wonder why they can’t grasp the culture? I’m sure any of us could go and lurk any board in existence and fit in after a bit, even if you were there for information gathering purposes. It’s not hard.
They think that KF is all muh hackers in basements, but just from my interactions here there’s a lot of very normal people being fairly polite to each other and just laughing at clown world.
““For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?”
 
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