Social media bans can make it harder to recruit new followers, but existing supporters can become more toxic.
It’s been over a year since Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube banned an array of domestic extremist networks, including QAnon, boogaloo, and Oath Keepers, that had flourished on their platforms leading up to the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot. Around the same time, these companies also banned President Donald Trump, who was accused of amplifying these groups and their calls for violence.
So did the “Great Deplatforming” work? There is growing evidence that deplatforming these groups did limit their presence and influence online, though it’s still hard to determine exactly how it has impacted their offline activities and membership.
While extremist groups have dispersed to alternative platforms like Telegram, Parler, and Gab, they have had a harder time growing their online numbers at the same rate as when they were on the more mainstream social media apps, several researchers who study extremism told Recode. Although the overall effects of deplatforming are far-reaching and difficult to measure in full, several academic studies about the phenomenon over the past few years, as well as data compiled by media intelligence firm Zignal Labs for Recode, support some of these experts’ observations.
Even since these bans and policy changes, some extremism on mainstream social media remains undetected, particularly in private Facebook Groups and on private Twitter accounts. As recently as early January, Facebook’s recommendation algorithm was still promoting to some users militia content by groups such as the Three Percenters — whose members have been charged with conspiracy in the Capitol riot — according to a report by DC watchdog group the Tech Transparency Project. The report is just one example of how major social media platforms still regularly fail to find and remove overtly extremist content. Facebook said it has since taken down nine out of 10 groups listed in that report.
Data from Zignal Labs shows that after major social media networks banned most QAnon groups, mentions of popular keywords associated with it decreased. The volume of QAnon and related mentions dropped by 30 percent year over year across Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit in 2021. Specifically, mentions of popular catchphrases like “the great awakening,” “Q Army,” and “WWG1WGA,” decreased respectively by 46 percent, 66 percent, and 88 percent.
This data suggests that deplatforming QAnon may have worked to reduce conversations by people who use such rallying catchphrases. However, even if the actual organizing and dialogue from these groups has gone down, people (and the media) are still talking about many extremist groups with more frequency — in QAnon’s case, around 279 percent more in 2021 than 2020.
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