Bad Gateway: How Deplatforming Affects Extremist Websites
By Megan Squire
Deplatforming websites—removing infrastructure services they need to operate, such as website hosting—can reduce the spread and reach of extremism and hate online, but when does deplatforming succeed? This report shows that deplatforming can decrease the popularity of extremist websites, especially when done without warning. We present four case studies of English-language, U.S.-based extremist websites that were deplatformed: the Daily Stormer, 8chan/8kun, TheDonald.win/Patriots.win, and Nicholas Fuentes/America First. In all of these cases, the infrastructure service providers considered deplatforming only after highly publicized or violent events, indicating that at the infrastructure level, the bar to deplatforming is high. All of the site administrators in these four cases also elected to take measures to remain online after they were deplatformed. To understand how deplatforming affected these sites, we collected and analyzed publicly available data that measures website-popularity rankings over time.
We learned four important lessons about how deplatforming affects extremist websites:
It can cause popularity rankings to decrease immediately.
It may take users a long time to return to the website. Sometimes, the website never regains its previous popularity.
Unexpected deplatforming makes it take longer for the website to regain its previous popularity levels.
Replicating deplatformed services such as discussion forums or live-streaming video products on a stand-alone website presents significant challenges, including higher costs and smaller audiences.
Our findings show that fighting extremism online requires not only better content moderation and more transparency from social media companies but also cooperation from infrastructure providers like Cloudflare, GoDaddy, and Google, which have avoided attention and critique.
New York: Anti-Defamation League, Center for Technology and Society, 2023. 37p.