Tim Pool on social media policy: what the evidence says · JRE #1258
“And it's also one of the women who wrote that said that it's been proven over and over again that deplatforming is an effective way to silence people.”
What the evidence says
Tim Pool attributes to an unnamed co-author of a report (context suggests the 2018 Data & Society media manipulation report) the claim that deplatforming has been 'proven over and over again' to be an effective way to silence people, but he does not name the person, cite the specific report passage, or provide any citation, making the attribution itself unverifiable. The underlying research on deplatforming's effectiveness is mixed rather than settled: a 2023 PNAS study found that removing leaders of banned hate organizations from Facebook reduced hateful content production and audience engagement over time, while a separate 2023 PNAS Nexus study found that deplatforming Parler users did not decrease their overall activity levels on fringe alternative platforms. Characterizing this body of research as having 'proven over and over again' a uniform silencing effect overstates the actual, context-dependent and sometimes contradictory findings in the academic literature.