No Easy Way Out: The Effectiveness of Deplatforming an Extremist Forum to Suppress Hate and Harassment

Legislators and policymakers worldwide are debating options for suppressing illegal, harmful and undesirable material online. Drawing on several quantitative datasets, we show that deplatforming an active community to suppress online hate and harassment, even with a substantial collective effort involving several tech firms, can be hard. Our case study is the disruption of the largest and longest-running harassment forum Kiwi Farms in late 2022, which is probably the most extensive industry effort to date. We collected complete snapshots of this site and its primary competitor Lolcow Farm, encompassing over 14.7M posts during their lifespan over the past decade. These data are supplemented with a full scrape of the Telegram channel used to disseminate new updates when the forum was down, tweets made by the online community leading the takedown, and search interest and web traffic to the forum spanning two months before and four months after the event. Despite the active participation of several tech firms over a few months, this campaign failed to shut down the forum and remove its objectionable content. While briefly raising public awareness, it led to rapid platform displacement and traffic fragmentation. Part of the activity decamped to Telegram, while traffic shifted from the primary domain to previously abandoned alternatives. The community leading the campaign lost interest quickly, traffic was directed back to the main domain, users quickly returned, and the forum was back online and became even more connected. The net effect was that forum activity, active users, threads, posts and traffic were all cut by about half. Deplatforming a dispersed community using a series of court orders against individual service providers appears unlikely to be very effective if the censor cannot incapacitate the key maintainers, whether by arresting them, enjoining them or otherwise deterring them.