When Donald Trump was kicked off social media in 2021, liberal pundit Matthew Yglesias tweeted, "It's kinda weird that deplatforming Trump just like completely worked with no visible downside whatsoever." Two years later, Fox News fired Tucker Carlson, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) celebrated that "deplatforming works," though she worried about the long-term implications.
"I also kind of feel like I'm waiting for the cut scene at the end of a Marvel movie after all the credits have rolled, and then you like see the villain's hand reemerge," said Ocasio-Cortez.
As it turns out, every major star gets a sequel. Trump is back in the White House, and Carlson has a bigger audience than ever before.
What we've learned is that deplatforming doesn't work.
In 2021, I published a video at Reason predicting this backfire effect, comparing the media ecosystem to Freud's theory of the unconscious:
Sigmund Freud theorized that when thoughts or experiences are repressed, they inevitably resurface in more deranged and damaging forms. When our dominant communication platforms seek to repress widely held beliefs and opinions, those beliefs and opinions aren't likely to simply disappear but rather reemerge elsewhere.
What we've learned since the Great Deplatforming of 2021, and the subsequent rise of extremist commentators like Nick Fuentes, is that the best way to exorcise our demons is to confront them head-on.
The Platform Wars
It's understandable why progressives thought they'd won the platform wars in the early 2020s. Remember when Amazon Web Services deplatformed Parler, the right-wing social media network? Or when Facebook suppressed and Twitter blocked a completely accurate New York Post story about Hunter Biden's laptop?
Remember when the New York Times' Kevin Roose wanted President Joe Biden to appoint a "reality czar," and for a moment it looked like that was actually going to happen?
... continue reading