With the sheer volume of disinformation out there, you can't even start to imagine having the required manpower to squash it all with refutation alone.
De-platforming is always going to fail because your opponents are hydras. "Yay, we crushed Milo Yiannopoulos!" Er, wait, how's that going, really? Malevolent troublemaking nihilists are still at large? _Donald Trump_ won the next election?
Better to have it out in public.
The strongest evidence against this is that the groups being deplatformed seem really, really upset by it. Seems like they wouldn't be so concerned if it wasn't effective.
> "Yay, we crushed Milo Yiannopoulos!" Er, wait, how's that going, really?
Pretty well, given that he hasn't been relevant to anything in years.
That's a name I haven't heard in a long time, so in a way deplatforming worked.
And I believe that it's better than the alternative of letting disinformation run amok in a pandemic.
Is the actual goal of de-platforming individuals to punish or silence specific individuals, or is it to suppress remove certain kinds of speech from public discourse?
Yes. Combat disinformation by refuting it. This requires credibility, and censorship is one of the fastest ways to burn that down.