While former president Donald Trump has undoubtedly been the highest-profile individual to be banned from social media in recent years, he is one of a growing number of individuals who have been removed from platforms that are striving to maintain either a more reliable or simply more decent environment for users.
Interesting new research from Binghamton University, State University of New York explores what happens to such individuals after they’re banned. Do they take their removal as a sign to clean up their act or do they double down on the behaviors that saw them removed?
Posing a problem
A popular narrative around banning problematic individuals is that removing them will remove the problem they created. The researchers were able to identify accounts belonging to the same person on various platforms to see if that was really the case.
They monitored people who had previously been banned on either Reddit or Twitter as they re-emerged on Parler or Gab, where moderation standards are more relaxed. The results suggest that little in their behavior changes, other than perhaps it becoming even more toxic.
“You can’t just ban these people and say, ‘Hey, it worked.’ They don’t disappear,” the researchers say. “They go off into other places. It does have a positive effect on the original platform, but there’s also some degree of amplification or worsening of this type of behavior elsewhere.”
Moving on
The study was possible in large part because people reuse the same username on different platforms for ease of use and continuity. Once suspects were identified, humans were used to cross-reference their activity to assure the researchers that they were truly the same person. Then, a machine learning classifier program was used to spot the particular characteristics to look out for.
The analysis found that around 59% of people banned from Twitter subsequently created Gab accounts, whereas 76% of Reddit users did likewise. What’s more, the users seemed to become more toxic and more active when they were forced onto Gab. Of course, Gab is also a much smaller platform than either Reddit or Twitter, so that toxicity has a smaller reach than it would otherwise have had.
“Reducing reach probably is a good thing, but reach can be easily misinterpreted. Just because someone has 100,000 followers doesn’t mean they’re all followers in the real world,” the researchers say.
“The hardcore group, maybe the group that we’re most concerned about, are the ones that probably stick with someone if they move elsewhere online. If by reducing that reach, you increase the intensity that the people who stay around are exposed to, it’s like a quality versus quantity type of question. Is it worse to have more people seeing this stuff? Or is it worse to have more extreme stuff being produced for fewer people?”
How to act
If banning doesn’t seem to remove toxic views from public display, what is the answer? For some time now, Reddit administrators have been able to “shadow ban” users, which creates the impression to that person that they’re still active and able to use the site, but their content isn’t visible to anyone else.
By contrast, Twitter attempted to tag particular pieces of content that they believed to be untrue or guilty of spreading misinformation. On discussion forums, meanwhile, a common approach would be to “send users to Coventry”, which made their user experience worse in the hope that the user would gradually drift away from the platform.
Whatever approach is used, the study reminds us that banning the individual may remove them from a particular platform but is very unlikely to remove their views from public discourse, which is perhaps the desirable outcome from a societal perspective.
“Society is now fairly firmly saying that we cannot ignore this stuff—we can’t just use the easy outs anymore,” the researchers conclude. “We need to come up with some more creative ideas to not get rid of people, but hopefully push them in a positive direction or at least make sure that everybody is aware of who that person is. Somewhere in between just unfettered access and banning everybody is probably the right solution.”
