April Glaser writes:

[After banning Infowars, Alex Jones, Paul Joseph Watson, and other inflammatory figures like far-right personalities Laura Loomer and Milo Yiannopoulos, white supremacist politician Paul Nehlen, and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan] Facebook didn’t share what rules specifically were violated or what the process was for reviewing its rules. Presumably, if Thursday’s actions reflect a new approach that Facebook is now taking—or at least a new sense of urgency—then far more than seven accounts would have been banned.

Still: At the end of the day, a bunch of high-profile bigots had been stripped of a major platform. It should’ve resonated as a victory against the fringe figures who have benefited from the distortionary effects of social media, where ranking algorithms tend to benefit divisive, emotional content. So why did this latest act of content moderation instead feel underwhelming?

Deplatforming certainly does help to reduce the spread of hate. Since Alex Jones lost his main Facebook and YouTube pages in August, traffic to Infowars has plummeted. Milo Yiannopoulos, a far-right provocateur who was banned from Twitter for directing racist harassment at the actress Leslie Jones, can no longer receive financial backing from his fan base via Venmo or PayPal and is reportedly in severe debt. (Those services banned him last year after he sent $14.88, a number that symbolizes a salute to Hitler in neo-Nazi communities, to a Jewish journalist.) But, particularly in Facebook’s case, deplatforming also has to align with a set of clearly articulated policies so that it isn’t read as a tyrannical act of corporate censorship that will further inflame accusations of bias. In this case, Facebook created a news story in much the way it might if it had announced a new product, but it didn’t actually say why specifically the accounts were removed. What should have been a by-the-book punitive act became a spectacle—and probably one that Alex Jones and the like will try to spin to their advantage. Facebook has the power to punish wrongdoers, as it did on Thursday. But we don’t know its full rationale for doing so, nor do we know who will be next. [Continue reading…]