Banning people who voice extreme views on social media does actually reduce their audience. The practice of 鈥渄eplatforming鈥� 鈥� denying someone the ability to post on a social network after they violate the terms of service 鈥� has come into question in recent years, because it was thought that it may just relocate extremist users rather than reduce their reach. But now there is evidence that banning people who post extreme content from sites like YouTube greatly reduces their audience and influence.
at National Taiwan University and at Harvard University analysed a data set of more than 11,000 YouTube channels of all political persuasions between January 2018 and October 2019. They monitored how many videos each account posted, what number of views they got, and whether the channels remained on YouTube throughout the study period.
The pair sought to add hard data to the debate on deplatforming, which pits the benefits of removing questionable content from mainstream online platforms like YouTube against possibly pushing the people posting or watching the content to the fringes of the internet, where it is harder to keep track of extremism.
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鈥淲hen Alex Jones [the host of InfoWars, a conspiratorially minded online video show] was deplatformed, he himself claimed it won鈥檛 hurt him too much,鈥� says Rauchfleisch. At the time, Jones advised his fans to follow him to BitChute, a video-hosting website that promotes its free-speech credentials. 鈥淭here was even a discussion of whether maybe it helped him and made him stronger,鈥� says Rauchfleisch.
Rauchfleisch was sceptical about that though, because of the dominance of YouTube, which has 2 billion users every month, and the way users can benefit from promotion through YouTube鈥檚 algorithm.
About 1 in 20 of all the channels Rauchfleisch and Kaiser tracked over the course of 22 months was deleted or banned. While a quarter of channels were removed for copyright infringement, far-right leaning channels were more likely to be banned for violating hate speech rules.
The pair then checked BitChute to see if those far-right channels were present there. Just 20 channels migrated over to BitChute between 2018 and 2019.
The average video posted on YouTube on these channels before deplatforming received 19.5 times more views than the average on BitChute 鈥� though this differed by channel. Views on Alex Jones鈥檚 videos dropped from a median of 56,620 on YouTube to 662 on BitChute. But one small alt-right channel only dropped from a median of 4322 views on YouTube to 1057 on BitChute.
鈥淏ased on the view numbers, you can definitely say their platform is smaller,鈥� says Rauchfleisch. Some users could have migrated to different platforms, though, which isn鈥檛 accounted for in the study.
The study analysed YouTube at a time when it began introducing significant policy changes under which the company took a more interventionist approach to hate speech, which isn鈥檛 fully accounted for in the data used in the paper. Neither YouTube nor BitChute responded to 快猫短视频鈥檚 requests for comment.
鈥淲e still have a lot to learn about the larger video-sharing ecosystem,鈥� says Rebekah Tromble at George Washington University in Washington DC. 鈥淏itChute is one alternative to YouTube. However, there are quite a few other platforms out there, and it鈥檚 possible that, taken together, their influence is larger than we yet know.鈥�
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