A quick side note, this was a artical I started writing back in Febuary last year when returning from Fosdom 24. I have worked on it since some about but this is more a capsual of what my brain was thinking and isn’t a complete argument. There is lots more I want to say on the matter which I maybe will someday. For now, I thought I may as well post it.

Introduction

For the last decade, we have seen the rise of platforms such as Odysee, Rumble and other blogging/vlogging sites which made their name by allowing anything and everything. They started their prominence when sites like Twitter and YouTube started to remove people they didn’t agree with and the content they post (i.e. far right content).

In this article I try not to talk about if platforms should be able to deplatform people but weather they should. While I do have political beliefs that fall on the left, I want this to be about the effects of deplatforming.

The most interesting conversations I have are with those I fundamentally disagree with. I think most of us can understand why it is important to have these conversations.

While I would say I fall on the left now, when I was younger I was gripped by radical right views. I had a hate for things that are now my way of life; for people that I now hold close. While being confronted with facts rarely changes peoples believes, having other ideas lying around dose at least give you a chance to get out.

Deplatforming

It feels light the right thing to do… Someone spreads hate so you remove them from the picture. Clean, simple and effective?

I don’t see it that way. When you remove someone from a platform they don’t just disappear, they move. There die hard fans follow them to some smaller platform that allows this sort of hate and some other stragglers join just to see what is happening. All this has achieved is creating a boiling pot of hate. Instead of hearing other voices sometimes, all you hear is the same voices screaming the same hateful content.

One thing we know about how we experience fact is that fact really doesn’t matter. Most people are not swayed by reason. People often pick up these views by hearing them over and over till they just assume it’s true.

As people move to the fringes of the internet, you can start to see how that has an effect on what people believe.

How we got here

“Ok, but deplatforming is just a solution for a much more broken system.” Yes! The problem with our system is we push for interaction regardless of the content. This constant push for more and more interaction is driving this. People creating the algorithms never considered the affect of their work. By measuring for interaction without considering what people are saying, e.g. “fuck of you racist”, the platform just sees that as a positive input increasing the chance of it being pushed.

You can see how hate rises to the top with this model?

Ok, so what needs doing? Can I fix this?

Yes I am going to talk about the Fediverse… sue me!

I wish in a small blog post I could say I know the fix for all of this, but I don’t. It is a complicated issue which is entangled with social and political issues of today. Part of the problem is of course how technology operates which brings me to the Fediverse.

I don’t think the Fediverse provides a solution to all the issues with social media by a long shot, but it does allow some level of flexibility.

If someone is kicked of a specific instance you can still follow them when they move. You don’t have to move, you still keep your all your stuff in the same place and lots of this is automated anyway, so chances are you won’t even notice.

This means a instance doesn’t have to host it, but it doesn’t mean they can take your voice away from an audience. This means people still get to have interactions with people who may have a less right view and still have that connection with the person that they would have otherwise followed of the platform.

There are still lots of problems, but I think more, and more people are opening up to the idea that one company should control who can speak.

While I talk about the right being deplatformed, which was more the case pre-2020. We are now seeing this happening to the left, this is something that we are going to start experiencing. Having platforms that allow us to speak freely is extremely important.