Censorious tech activist and former Reddit CEO Ellen K. Pao proclaimed the success of deplatforming across Big Tech platforms to obliterate so-called “hate” from the internet.
Liberals are taking a victory lap as anti-establishment video commentators are being wiped out. “Deplatforming hate works. It worked on reddit in 2015, and now it's working on YouTube,” Pao tweeted June 17. Pao retweeted a thread from an account that suggested “deplatforming is effective in minimizing the reach of far-right channels like Alex Jones & cannot be compensated on alternative platforms.”
The account, purporting to be Communication, Science and Journalism Assistant Professor Adrian Rauchfleisch, then followed with a graphic in a tweet, suggesting: “We also tested whether we could observe a so-called Martyr-effect for Alex Jones, James Allsup, and Red Ice TV. Our RDD shows that Youtube's deplatforming lead to a short-term increase in views on BitChute - still, it's far from the reach they had before on YouTube.”
The Twitter thread included a link to a study titled, “Deplatforming the far-right: An analysis of YouTube and BitChute.” The abstract of the study demonstrated that even when so-called “far-right” creators successfully moved to new platforms, their viewership and ability to reach new audiences shrank to a mere fraction of what it once was: “Our analysis shows that deplatforming is effective in minimizing the reach of disinformation and extreme speech, as alternative platforms that will allow this kind of content cannot mitigate the negative effect of being deplatformed on YouTube.”
Pao praising censorship tactics is not surprising. The former Reddit CEO banned five communities on the platform while she was in power because of off-site behavior. She also wanted the pro-Trump subreddit The_Donald banned, because groups like these are “just wrong,” according to Pao. Her censorship exploits also “earned the nickname ‘Chairman Pao’ for her strict pro-censorship policies that changed the culture of the platform,” Reclaim The Net summarized.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact YouTube at (650) 623-4000, or via Facebook and Twitter. Demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on “hate speech” and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us at the Media Research Center contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
