Voat is discussed elsewhere here, too. In short, the point was precisely to get the speech off Reddit because it was poisoning Reddit. People said it wasn’t worth them trying because it would move to other subreddits. It didn’t, it moved offsite entirely.
De-platforming worked for Reddit. OP asked for tech contributions to reducing the amount of polarised speech in online spaces. There is one.
Thank you for responding with actual data. I'll have to read the article.
> De-platforming worked for Reddit. OP asked for tech contributions to reducing the amount of polarised speech in online spaces. There is one.
I'm not sure how one can look at Reddit being more consistently liberal, and Voat being... Voat, and see this as "reducing the amount of polarised speech in online spaces".
I actually find these alternate sites useful for monitoring the latest foreign propaganda because my spouse is from a country with a hostile relationship to the U.S. and consumes most of her news in her native language, which is full of misinformation. I can now more clearly understand where she gets her opinions from sometimes and we can talk it out.
If anything, banning extremists makes these ideologies more palatable to a larger group of people by creating a more gradual on-ramp at the entry level. I believe this is becoming more obvious as we see the middle ground position in the current "culture" conflict (which would still probably get you banned from facebook) rapidly becoming acceptable. The pendulum keeps swinging, and not many people involved seem very interested in stopping the broken cycle and finding a more sustainable solution.
This is simply not an accurate representation of history.
Milo Yiannopoulos fell out of popularity because of repeated issues with pedophilia, which even the right doesn't condone.
Katie Hopkins was financially ruined Monroe v. Hopkins[1].
InfoWars still has a larger readership than The Economist or Newsweek[2], so I'm not sure where you get the idea that they have lost influence. It sounds like you might be inside of an echo chamber.
You may be looking at a different study, but the only study[3] I know of on the banning of hate sub-Reddits showed that content didn't pop up elsewhere on Reddit. It doesn't show that the hate didn't just move over to Voat, which is my theory as to what happened. Yes, the study was publicized as "deplatforming works", but only because people didn't know where the people who were deplatformed went.
The rest of your post follows suit with claims that aren't based in reality.
[1] by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monroe_v_Hopkins
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InfoWars (top section)
[3] https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/11/study-finds-reddits-contro...