A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming
Reading this article is like watching someone beat the ocean with a stick.  What would it look like for an &quot;anti-deplatforming&quot; initiative to succeed?  All ideas have equal access to all platforms?  Just the big ones?  The objective is so poorly formed, it&#x27;s not even wrong.<p>A platform&#x27;s identity and ability to attract an audience are determined by the activities they accept &#x2F; cultivate, not vice versa.  Infowars wanted to be on Facebook because it made it easier to sell your grandparents vitamin supplements, but Facebook felt that leaving them on make it a place families (and their grandparents) won&#x27;t visit.  Gab would like to use Stripe or Paypal because they are trusted payment providers, but those networks felt they&#x27;d stop being trusted payment providers if they let Gab stay on.<p>And there&#x27;s plenty of reason to think they&#x27;re right: super-permissive platforms exist and work (4chan et al.), they just don&#x27;t attract the same broad audience.  When people complain about being deplatformed, they&#x27;re just saying &quot;the platforms that accept me aren&#x27;t popular enough&quot;.  I&#x27;m glad our internet is enough of a distributed commons that many platforms are broadly accessible -- but nobody owes you an audience at the most popular ones.