Does Deplatforming Work? Unintended consequences of banning far-right content creators

Danny Klinenberg
Additional contact information
Danny Klinenberg: University of California, Santa Barbara

Empirical Studies of Conflict Project (ESOC) Working Papers from Empirical Studies of Conflict Project

Abstract: Social media has become an outlet for extremists to fundraise and organize on, potentially leading to deadly consequences. While governments deliberate on how to regulate this challenge, some social media companies have removed creators of offensive content—deplatforming. I estimate the effects of deplatforming on revenue and viewership, using variation in the timing of removals across two video-streaming companies- YouTube, and its far-right competitor, Bitchute. I construct a novel dataset including Bitcoin wallets linking YouTube and Bitchute accounts for 79 far-right content creators, including propagandists for violent domestic extremist movements. Being deplatformed on YouTube results in a 30% increase in weekly Bitcoin revenue and a 50% increase in viewership on Bitchute. This increase in Bitchute activity accounts for about 65% of the estimated foregone revenue and 5.9% of viewership lost from YouTube, implying a negative net effect of deplatforming.

JEL-codes: L86 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pay
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://esoc.princeton.edu/WP31

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pri:esocpu:31

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Empirical Studies of Conflict Project (ESOC) Working Papers from Empirical Studies of Conflict Project Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bobray Bordelon ().