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


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." ®
 
Delicious tears. I do wonder what would happen if a person like this was actually forced to interact with someone that disagrees with them. Hell, I wonder how such a soy infested creature would deal if faced with actual hate like a Islamic mob wanting to stone a apostate or a Neonazi gang wanting to beat someone to death. Do you think they would have any sort of self reflection? Do you think they would actually go down their gay little "deprogramming" routine?
 
They mention de-radicalizing the males but they dont mention the females so i can only conclude that the plan for them is catch and release.
They’ll force the terfs to be sex slaves to trannies. A fate worse than death.
Delicious tears. I do wonder what would happen if a person like this was actually forced to interact with someone that disagrees with them. Hell, I wonder how such a soy infested creature would deal if faced with actual hate like a Islamic mob wanting to stone a apostate or a Neonazi gang wanting to beat someone to death. Do you think they would have any sort of self reflection? Do you think they would actually go down their gay little "deprogramming" routine?
They’d cry.
 
Null did it. He has become the topic of a scierntific project. Though I would add the following subtitle: "how one guy too stubborn to give up gave the whole deplatforming mob the finger"

Also duhhh. If you put pressure on people who already feel disadvantaged they just feel more disadvantaged. How retarded do you have to be to think that confirming their believes would make them less angry?

Edit: and just reading the comments under the article and I really start to think that lefties can't find evidence of what Antifa and BLM thugs do. It's incredible. The proof of wehat yuri Bezmehnov said "I could shower them with information and they would deny it is real" Now I know why we are doomed. Too many ignorant and stupid people on Earth
 
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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'm sure a former glowie is ready and willing to share insider information on 4chan that just so happens to confirm the fantasy that the United States governments top priority is banning 4chan-tier shitposts and their memes are genuine weapons in the culture war.
Doesn't help that the army of shills they employ are all very low IQ and the spaced they are trying to combat usually end up with highly intelligent but usually autistic social outcasts. To wit:
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You can imagine this went over well with the legion of autistic right wing shitposters
Edit: this is how

how do i delete a thread.png
That is embarrassing, but those posters still had the last laugh when Trump lost and have been on a non-stop victory parade since.
 
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Aaaaaaahahahh
If you're in this little town close to a little hotel you might have heard me laugh out loud

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I HATE THE DEPROGRAMMING OF HATE!
I HATE THE DEPROGRAMMING OF HATE!
 
There are too many people who put the milk in first and/or use far too much. And from personal experience, most bafflingly, it’s always the English?!
I must be the only person I know who drinks Earl Grey black.

People with unpopular opinions are always going to exist, and trying to indoctrinate them is only going to incentivise them to become more radical and unhinged. If you want to make someone look bad, take a page out of Brooke Alvarez's playbook:
 
Do you think they will have the decency to seperate us by topic boards so we have something to talk about?
God I hope so I want to hang out with the other people on the Russell Greer thread. I can't wait to escape and run guerrilla raids on their supply lines to camp kiwi with weapons smuggled out of Russia and Ukraine.
 
Edit: and just reading the comments under the article and I really start to think that lefties can't find evidence of what Antifa and BLM thugs do. It's incredible. The proof of wehat yuri Bezmehnov said "I could shower them with information and they would deny it is real" Now I know why we are doomed. Too many ignorant and stupid people on Earth

If you hang out in lefty spaces, they often claim it's all Proud Boys/Patriot Front disguised as Antifa, to try to give Antifa a bad name.
 
I must be the only person I know who drinks Earl Grey black.

People with unpopular opinions are always going to exist, and trying to indoctrinate them is only going to incentivise them to become more radical and unhinged. If you want to make someone look bad, take a page out of Brooke Alvarez's playbook:
I drink Earl Grey black. If you need to add stuff to your Earl Grey, you bought shitty tea.
 
Edit: and just reading the comments under the article and I really start to think that lefties can't find evidence of what Antifa and BLM thugs do. It's incredible. The proof of wehat yuri Bezmehnov said "I could shower them with information and they would deny it is real" Now I know why we are doomed. Too many ignorant and stupid people on Earth
They literally go out of their way to ignore all of it, and insist literal video proof is right wing lies. They have literally programmed themselves to ignore it. If you say there were riots in 2020 they act dumb, and if you post videos they just ignore and whatabout. I am surprised they haven't started blanked declaring everything they don't like to be deep fakes already.
 
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