Deplatforming
Based on Wikipedia: Deplatforming
In August 2018, Alex Jones disappeared from the internet. Not literally, of course—the conspiracy theorist and InfoWars founder was still very much alive and shouting into cameras. But within a matter of days, he was erased from Facebook, Apple, YouTube, and Spotify. His podcasts vanished. His videos evaporated. His reach, built over two decades of broadcasting, contracted like a punctured balloon.
This was deplatforming in action—the coordinated removal of someone's ability to speak through digital channels. And Jones's case would become the template for a practice that now shapes how we think about speech, power, and the internet itself.
The Practice Before the Word
Long before anyone coined the term "deplatforming," institutions were already deciding who got to speak and who didn't.
In the 1940s, the University of California maintained something called the Speaker Ban. Under President Robert Gordon Sproul, the university reserved the right to block speakers who might "exploit its prestige" for "propaganda." The targets were mostly, though not exclusively, communists—this was the early Cold War, after all.
The ban caught some surprising figures. In 1947, Henry Wallace, who had served as Vice President of the United States under Franklin Roosevelt, was prohibited from speaking at UCLA because his views on American foreign policy were deemed too controversial. In 1951, the socialist Max Shachtman was blocked from Berkeley. A decade later, Malcolm X faced the same treatment—not for his racial politics, but because the university classified him as a religious leader.
Across the Atlantic, British students formalized the practice earlier than their American counterparts. The National Union of Students established its "No Platform" policy in 1973, originally targeting fascist and racist organizations. The idea was straightforward: some views are so harmful that giving them a venue—any venue—lends them undeserved legitimacy.
The Campus Battleground
Universities have always been contested terrain for speech. They're supposed to be places where ideas clash and the best ones win. But they're also communities with values, and those values sometimes conflict with the principle of open debate.
In the mid-1980s, when Glenn Babb, the South African ambassador, visited Canadian universities, students protested. They weren't arguing that Babb was wrong about apartheid—they were arguing that he shouldn't get to make his case at all. His presence on campus, they believed, would normalize a regime built on racial oppression.
The pattern has repeated countless times since. In March 2017, protesters at Middlebury College in Vermont disrupted a speech by Charles Murray, a political scientist whose work on intelligence and genetics has drawn accusations of scientific racism. The disruption turned physical—a professor escorting Murray was injured in the chaos.
Sometimes the disinvitations happen quietly. In February 2018, students at the University of Central Oklahoma withdrew a speaking invitation to Ken Ham, the creationist who built a life-sized replica of Noah's Ark in Kentucky. An LGBTQ student group had pressured the university, objecting to Ham's views on sexuality.
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which advocates for campus speech, has been tracking these incidents since 2000. By February 2020, they'd documented 469 attempts to disinvite speakers or disrupt their talks at American universities. Some succeeded. Some failed. All of them illustrated the same tension: between the freedom to speak and the freedom to refuse to listen.
When Platforms Became Power
For most of human history, being silenced meant being physically prevented from speaking—thrown out of a venue, banned from a publication, imprisoned, or worse. The internet was supposed to change that. Anyone with a connection could publish their thoughts to the entire world.
What we didn't anticipate was that the internet would consolidate into a handful of platforms, and those platforms would become the new gatekeepers.
Think about what it means to be banned from YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Apple's podcast directory simultaneously. You can still speak. You can set up your own website. You can shout on street corners. But you've lost access to the channels where billions of people actually spend their time. In practical terms, you've been rendered invisible to most of the digital world.
This is the new landscape of deplatforming. It's not governments doing the censoring—it's private companies enforcing their terms of service. And because these companies are private, the First Amendment doesn't apply. As Audie Cornish, the NPR host, put it: "The government can't silence your ability to say almost anything you want on a public street corner. But a private company can silence your ability to say whatever you want on a platform they created."
The Alex Jones Precedent
When the major platforms moved against Alex Jones in August 2018, they acted within days of each other, creating an impression of coordinated action even if each company made its decision independently.
Facebook cited specific violations: dehumanizing immigrants, Muslims, and transgender people, plus glorifying violence. Apple removed his podcasts from iTunes. YouTube deleted channels associated with InfoWars. Spotify followed. Then came the secondary platforms—Vimeo, Pinterest, Mailchimp, LinkedIn.
Jones tried to adapt. When Facebook banned him, he started directing followers to NewsWars, another site he controlled. But the platforms kept closing doors. In September, Twitter banned him permanently after he confronted a CNN reporter during a congressional hearing. PayPal cut him off from processing payments. Apple removed the InfoWars app from its store.
The cascade continued into 2019 and beyond. YouTube terminated channels that reposted InfoWars content. In March 2020, Google removed the InfoWars app from its Play store over COVID-19 misinformation.
Through it all, one platform held out. Roku, the streaming device company, kept InfoWars available, stating they don't "curate or censor based on viewpoint." The backlash was swift and fierce. Roku reversed course, removing InfoWars and acknowledging they'd heard from "concerned parties."
This pattern—platform resistance, public pressure, eventual compliance—would repeat itself in the years to come.
Does It Work?
Here's the question that hangs over every deplatforming debate: does removing someone actually reduce their influence, or does it just scatter their audience to darker corners of the internet?
The evidence is genuinely mixed.
A 2017 study examined what happened when Reddit banned several communities—called subreddits—for violating harassment policies. The researchers found something encouraging: users from the banned communities either left Reddit entirely or, if they stayed, dramatically reduced their use of hate speech. The communities that absorbed these displaced users didn't see an increase in toxic content.
Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters for America, pointed to Milo Yiannopoulos as a success story. After Twitter banned the provocateur in 2016, Carusone argued, Yiannopoulos "lost a lot... He lost his ability to be influential or at least to project a veneer of influence."
But other research tells a different story. Some content creators, forced off mainstream platforms, migrated to what's called "alt-tech"—alternative platforms with looser moderation policies. There, freed from the constraints that mainstream platforms imposed, some became more extreme, not less. Their audiences shrank, but their rhetoric intensified.
This is the deplatforming paradox. Removing someone from a major platform definitely reduces their reach. A million followers on Twitter is not the same as a thousand followers on some alternative site. But the people who follow you to that alternative site are likely to be your most dedicated fans—the ones most receptive to escalating messages.
January 6th and Its Aftermath
On January 6, 2021, a mob stormed the United States Capitol while Congress was certifying the electoral votes from the 2020 presidential election. The rioters believed, falsely, that the election had been stolen from Donald Trump. Five people died. Hundreds would eventually be charged with crimes.
In the immediate aftermath, the platforms acted with unprecedented speed.
Twitter suspended Trump's personal account, citing the risk that his tweets could incite further violence. When Trump tried posting from the official @POTUS government account, Twitter banned him permanently. Facebook and Instagram followed. YouTube restricted and then removed his content. Reddit acted against communities that had organized support for the protest.
This wasn't a fringe conspiracy theorist or a provocateur with a podcast. This was the sitting President of the United States, banned from the platforms he'd used to communicate directly with tens of millions of Americans.
The decision crystallized every tension in the deplatforming debate. Critics saw it as proof that unelected tech executives held too much power over public discourse. Supporters argued that no one, not even a president, should be allowed to use these platforms to incite violence.
Twitter also banned 70,000 other accounts linked to QAnon, the conspiracy movement that had helped fuel the riot. The sweep was massive, but it came too late for many critics. The question lingered: if these accounts were dangerous enough to ban after the Capitol attack, why had they been allowed to operate for years before it?
The Musk Reversal
In October 2022, Elon Musk completed his acquisition of Twitter. Almost immediately, the platform's approach to deplatforming changed.
On November 18, Musk began reinstating banned accounts. Kathy Griffin came back. Jordan Peterson came back. The Babylon Bee, a conservative satire site, came back. Musk articulated a new philosophy: "freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach." The idea was that people could say what they wanted, but Twitter's algorithms wouldn't amplify content that violated community standards.
The same week, Musk posted a poll asking whether Trump should be allowed back. The results were close—51.8% in favor—and Musk restored Trump's account. By that point, Trump had launched his own platform, Truth Social, and showed little interest in returning to Twitter. But the symbolic reversal was complete.
Andrew Tate's account was also reinstated. The British-American influencer had been banned in 2017 after suggesting women bore "some responsibility" in response to the #MeToo movement. In 2022, he'd been banned from Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube over content that platforms characterized as misogynistic hate speech. Under Musk's Twitter, he was welcome again.
Not everyone got their account back. When users asked about Alex Jones, Musk drew a line. He'd watched Jones spread lies about the Sandy Hook school shooting, claiming the massacre that killed twenty children was a hoax. "My firstborn child died in my arms," Musk wrote. "I felt his last heartbeat. I have no mercy for anyone who would use the deaths of children for gain, politics or fame."
Even in a regime of maximal free speech, some doors stay closed.
Demonetization: The Softer Sanction
Not every platform removal is absolute. Sometimes the content stays up, but the money disappears.
YouTube pioneered this approach. Since 2012, the platform has used automated systems to flag videos as "not advertiser-friendly." Creators whose videos get demonetized can still post—their content remains available to viewers—but they don't earn anything from ads that run alongside it.
For years, this happened silently. Creators didn't know why certain videos earned money while others didn't. In 2016, YouTube began notifying creators when their videos were demonetized, and the backlash was immediate. Creators accused the platform of censorship. YouTube countered that this wasn't censorship at all—no one was preventing anyone from posting. The platform was simply choosing not to pay for content that advertisers didn't want to be associated with.
The distinction matters, but it's cold comfort to creators who depend on advertising revenue. When your income disappears because an algorithm decided your content was problematic, the effect feels a lot like punishment, even if your videos remain technically available.
Beyond the Platforms
Deplatforming doesn't only happen on social media. The tactics have expanded to include pressure campaigns against employers, payment processors, and anyone else who might provide material support to controversial figures.
Doxing—publishing someone's private information to enable harassment—has become a weapon in these campaigns. So has swatting, the practice of making false emergency reports to send armed police to someone's home. These tactics aren't about removing platforms; they're about making the personal cost of speaking too high to bear.
In some cases, activists have tried to get controversial figures fired from their jobs. In 2019, students at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia petitioned to have Camille Paglia, a tenured professor for over thirty years, removed from the faculty and replaced by "a queer person of color." Paglia, who identifies as transgender, had been unapologetically outspoken on matters of sex, gender identity, and sexual assault. The petition failed, but the attempt itself was notable—as one journalist observed, "It is rare for student activists to argue that a tenured faculty member at their own institution should be denied a platform."
Even punk rock isn't immune. In December 2017, the San Francisco magazine Maximum Rocknroll discovered that a French artist they'd previously reviewed was a neo-Nazi. They apologized and announced a strict no-platform policy for "any bands and artists with a Nazi ideology."
The Legal and Political Response
Governments have begun grappling with deplatforming, though they've reached very different conclusions about what, if anything, should be done.
In the United Kingdom, Boris Johnson's government announced legislation in 2021 that would allow speakers to seek compensation for being no-platformed at universities. The bill would impose fines on universities and student unions that promoted the practice and establish an ombudsman to monitor cases. Separately, an Online Safety Bill would prohibit social media networks from discriminating against particular political views or removing "democratically important" content.
In the United States, Republican politicians have targeted Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the law that shields platforms from liability for content posted by their users. Critics argue that platforms are not neutral conduits—they make editorial decisions about what to allow and what to remove, and those decisions reflect political bias. Reform proposals would either eliminate Section 230's protections entirely or condition them on platforms demonstrating political neutrality.
Some have gone further, proposing that social media be regulated as a public utility, like water or electricity. The argument is that an internet presence has become so essential to participating in modern life that constitutional protections should apply to private platforms, not just government spaces.
These proposals face significant obstacles. The First Amendment, which protects speakers from government censorship, also protects platforms' rights to decide what content they'll host. Forcing a private company to carry speech it finds objectionable raises its own constitutional concerns.
The Argument for Deplatforming
Defenders of deplatforming make a straightforward case: it works.
When platforms host content that spreads misinformation, incites violence, or dehumanizes vulnerable groups, they're not neutral conduits. They're amplifiers. Their algorithms recommend content. Their notifications alert users to new posts. Their advertising models reward engagement, and nothing engages like outrage.
From this perspective, removing harmful content isn't censorship—it's editorial responsibility. Newspapers don't publish every letter to the editor. Television networks don't give airtime to every viewpoint. Social media platforms, which have become significant sources of news for their users, have the same obligation to exercise judgment about what they amplify.
The evidence suggests that deplatforming does reduce the reach of extremist content. The question is whether that reduction is worth the costs—the precedent it sets, the power it concentrates in private hands, the potential for abuse.
The Argument Against
Critics see deplatforming as a dangerous concentration of power in the hands of unaccountable corporations.
When a handful of companies can decide who gets to speak to a mass audience, they've assumed a role that used to belong to governments—and at least governments are subject to elections and constitutional constraints. Mark Zuckerberg wasn't elected by anyone. Neither was whoever wrote Twitter's terms of service.
There's also the question of consistency. Platforms claim to enforce neutral policies against hate speech and misinformation, but enforcement inevitably involves judgment calls. Who decides what counts as hate? Who determines what's true? The same tweet might be labeled misinformation on one platform and left alone on another. The same speaker might be banned from one service while thriving on its competitor.
Finally, critics worry about the chilling effect. When the cost of saying the wrong thing is losing access to the digital public square, people will self-censor. Not just the extremists, but ordinary users who aren't sure where the lines are. The result isn't a cleaner discourse—it's a narrower one.
No Clean Answers
Deplatforming sits at the intersection of everything complicated about speech in the digital age.
We want platforms open enough that dissenting voices can be heard. We also want them moderated enough that they don't become vectors for harassment, radicalization, and disinformation. We want private companies to exercise editorial judgment. We also want to ensure that judgment isn't exercised in ways that suppress legitimate political debate.
The technology journalist Declan McCullagh once began to write about "Silicon Valley's efforts to pull the plug on dissent"—but even articulating the critique is complicated. Is it dissent when someone spreads lies about a mass shooting? Is it censorship when a private company enforces its own rules?
These questions don't have clean answers. They require us to decide what kind of public sphere we want—how much chaos we'll tolerate in exchange for openness, how much control we'll grant to platforms in exchange for civility. Different societies will reach different conclusions. Different platforms will make different choices.
What's certain is that the debate will continue. As long as platforms have the power to amplify voices—and the power to silence them—we'll be arguing about when, whether, and how that power should be used.
``` The essay transforms the encyclopedic Wikipedia content into a narrative that: - Opens with the dramatic Alex Jones case as a hook - Traces the historical roots from 1940s university speaker bans - Explains how the internet consolidated power into platforms - Covers major cases (Jones, Trump, Tate) with narrative flow - Explores the "does it work?" question with nuanced evidence - Presents both sides of the debate fairly - Concludes with the inherent tensions without false resolution Word count is approximately 3,200 words (~16 minutes reading time), appropriate for Speechify listening.