Deplatforming
As early as 2015, platforms such as Reddit began to enforce selective bans based, for example, on terms of service that prohibit "hate speech".
[2] A famous example of deplatforming was Twitter's ban of then-US President Donald Trump shortly after the January 6 United States Capitol attack.
[6] In the mid-1980s, visits by South African ambassador Glenn Babb to Canadian college campuses faced opposition from students opposed to apartheid.
[7] In the United States, recent examples include the March 2017 disruption by protestors of a public speech at Middlebury College by political scientist Charles Murray.
[8][9] In March 2018, a "small group of protesters" at Lewis & Clark Law School attempted to stop a speech by visiting lecturer Christina Hoff Sommers.
"[13] In June 2020 and January 2021, Reddit also issued bans to two prominent online pro-Trump communities over violations of the website's content and harassment policies.
[14][15] In the wake of the 2021 storming of the US Capitol, Twitter banned then-president Donald Trump, as well as 70,000 other accounts linked to the event and the far-right movement QAnon.
[21] Facebook cited instances of dehumanizing immigrants, Muslims and transgender people, as well as glorification of violence, as examples of hate speech.
"[36] After Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter several previously banned accounts were reinstated including Donald Trump, Andrew Tate and Ye resulting in questioning if Alex Jones will be unbanned as well.
Trump subsequently tweeted similar messages from the President's official US Government account @POTUS, which resulted in him being permanently banned on January 8.
[61] In 2019, students at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia circulated an online petition demanding that Camille Paglia "should be removed from UArts faculty and replaced by a queer person of color."
According to The Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf, "It is rare for student activists to argue that a tenured faculty member at their own institution should be denied a platform."
Paglia, a tenured professor for over 30 years who identifies as transgender, had long been unapologetically outspoken on controversial "matters of sex, gender identity, and sexual assault".
[13][72][73] Angelo Carusone, president of the progressive organization Media Matters for America and who had run deplatforming campaigns against conservative talk hosts Rush Limbaugh in 2012 and Glenn Beck in 2010, pointed to Twitter's 2016 ban of Milo Yiannopoulos, stating that "the result was that he lost a lot....
According to Audie Cornish, host of the NPR show Consider This, "the government can't silence your ability to say almost anything you want on a public street corner.
"[74] In the words of technology journalist Declan McCullagh, "Silicon Valley's efforts to pull the plug on dissenting opinions" began around 2018 with Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube denying service to selected users of their platforms; he said they devised "excuses to suspend ideologically disfavored accounts".
Reynolds criticized the decision of "internet giants" to "slam the gates on a number of people and ideas they don't like", naming Alex Jones and Gavin McInnes.
[76] Reynolds cited further restrictions on "even mainstream conservative figures" such as Dennis Prager, as well as Facebook's blocking of a campaign advertisement by a Republican candidate "ostensibly because her video mentioned the Cambodian genocide, which her family survived.
He wrote: "Activists begin with social-media callouts; they urge authority figures to impose outcomes that they favor, without regard for overall student opinion; they try to marshal antidiscrimination law to limit freedom of expression.
They feared openly participating in a debate about a major event at their institution—even after their university president put out an uncompromising statement in support of free speech.
