It's not quite that simple; it's not zero-sum. Whacking one mole breaks up recruitment and kills momentum. People on the fringes lose interest and don't bother to find out where the core moved to. When the next mole comes up it's smaller and more divided, so you whack that one, and again, smaller, more peripheral, less momentum. That gives people who have peeled off a chance to get re-integrated into more sane communities rather than being bathed in constant toxicity, so they crawl back from radicalisation. At least, that's how it works below a certain size, and is why it's worth doing these things early, before they get to the_donald sort of numbers.

I'm talking about kicking them off Twitter, etc. They end up finding places that are even worse echo chambers than conventional social media.

There's people in my town who are like this. The "oppression" even fuels their narrative.

Better to keep them in the mainstream discussion, respond with ridicule, and use moderation to squash the overtly dangerous stuff, IMO.

Those places have to actually exist, though.

And ridicule doesn't work, clearly. Vanity may work for less-devoted people, but when you live in a deeply red state and are surrounded by Trumpers, there's no way you're going to speak up IRL, or break through the power of numbers in that social sphere.

> Those places have to actually exist, though.

There's enough people believing this that they're guaranteed to come into existence if you deny them access to mainstream platforms.

> but when you live in a deeply red state and are surrounded by Trumpers, there's no way you're going to speak up IRL

You can't interrupt the in-real-life contacts by any means (short of despotic ones).

But there's a certain number of people that will stop polluting an online space if they're being laughed at. But when you force them to create their own echo chamber even the more timid and susceptible to social pressure will be unbothered.

Echo chambers means nobody new is listening. They can't grow. That's a win.

Then you go after the echo chamber.

The flip side of that coin is that it also makes it harder to recruit people from broader platforms.

When the_donald left reddit, it became impossible for them to get their propaganda seen on the front page of reddit and seen by people who might join them. People won't casually stumble into a cesspool of lies and BS. Now they have to know it exists and actively seek it out.

I just googled "the donald" and they aren't even on the first page. Seems like deplatforming kind of worked....

This is exactly the point. Reduce vitality.

> I just googled "the donald" and they aren't even on the first page. Seems like deplatforming kind of worked....

If it worked, why is the same radicalized set of viewpoints seemingly growing in vitality?

the donald crowd has moved on to stuff like duckduckgo etc. This is the point the divide will grow with such tactics. and the donald is the first website in duckduckgo

That's because you use google, and vast majority use google... You kick enough people off, guess what their will be a conservative google, people who grew up in conservative households will use the same. What you suggested works when the numbers are small, but when its 50% of the population it's very likely they will make their own ecosystem. Tech giants became monopolies based on good faith...

What I'm not sure on is the effect of making a community smaller. If you have 10 million people in a tepid cesspool, shutting down that cesspool might make 100k of them move to a more extreme location, while the remainder stop being exposed to that influence. The remaining smaller community is more extreme, but primarily because it has only the more extreme members of the previous iteration.

Sort of like how doomsday cults get more fervent with each incorrectly predicted apocalypse. The cult gets smaller, but those that remain are the true believers.