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 "anti-deplatforming" initiative to succeed?  All ideas have equal access to all platforms?  Just the big ones?  The objective is so poorly formed, it's not even wrong.<p>A platform's identity and ability to attract an audience are determined by the activities they accept / 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't visit.  Gab would like to use Stripe or Paypal because they are trusted payment providers, but those networks felt they'd stop being trusted payment providers if they let Gab stay on.<p>And there's plenty of reason to think they're right: super-permissive platforms exist and work (4chan et al.), they just don't attract the same broad audience.  When people complain about being deplatformed, they're just saying "the platforms that accept me aren't popular enough".  I'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.