A Cross-Platform Analysis of Survivors of De-platforming after January 6

• In Event: Poster Session: Political Communication

Abstract

After the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol, major social media platforms such as Twitter banned users that incited violence or spread the “Big Lie” about voter fraud. Yet, alternative social media platforms such as Gab and Parler have mushroomed since 2016, providing a safe haven for those banned from mainstream platforms. Early literature based on data collected in 2016 and 2017 suggests that de-platforming had a limited effect in terms of activity and toxicity: after being banned on Twitter and Reddit, many users simply migrated to Gab and continued to spread hateful speech, conspiracy theories, and misinformation (Ali et al., 2021).

However, our understanding of far-right users who survived de-platforming on mainstream platforms remains limited. Did de-platforming have a chilling effect on those survivors on mainstream platforms? If so, did they migrate to alternative platforms? Or did de-platforming make them more animated and defiant on the mainstream and/or alternative platforms? These questions are important because they shed light on the potential (in)effectiveness of deplatforming.

In this paper, we conduct a cross-platform study to examine how Twitter’s post-January 6 deplatforming efforts affected Trump’s supporters on Twitter and Parler. We utilize a Parler dataset (Aliapoulios et al., 2021) and a unique Twitter dataset that consists of all users (n=1119) that either self-identified as a Trump/MAGA supporter or used QAnon related words in their profile descriptions (Zhang, Fan & Rohe, 2022). After querying user information in March 2022 through Twitter’s API, we found that 307 out of 1119 accounts remained active on Twitter.

Our preliminary analysis shows that Twitter’s de-platforming efforts after January 6 had a chilling effect on the survivors on Twitter, yet a mobilizing effect on Parler. On Twitter, those who survived de-platforming became less active. However, they referenced and linked to alternative platforms (i.e., Parler, Gab, Telegram, Mewe, Rumble and Bitchute) on Twitter significantly more in their tweets after de-platforming occurred. This suggests that the survivors of de-platforming might have been actively directing attention to alternative platforms.

To identify the same users on Parler, we use exact username matching, which has been validated by Ali and colleagues in their 2021 cross-platform study. In the absence of a perfect method to match users across platforms, exact username matching, though a rather conservative method, allows us to identify the same users with high confidence. Using this method, we were able to identify 31 Parler users who also remained active on Twitter after de-platforming. Those users showed increased activity on Parler after de-platforming.

Overall, our findings reveal that de-platforming may reduce the level of activity for the survivors of de-platforming on mainstream social media and activate activity on alternative social media. Such findings imply that de-platforming and moderation efforts are effective only to a point: they do not necessarily diminish problematic content in the broad media ecology. These findings expand knowledge in political communication by showing how right-wing actors survive on a mainstream platform and direct their followers to migrate to fringe platforms.

Our study is a first step towards understanding right-wing social media users who survived de-platforming. Different from previous scholarship that emphasizes the migration of de-platformed users, we focus on similar users who survived de-platforming and their activity on mainstream and alternative platforms. Our next steps will involve more qualitative modes of inquiry, which will help us better understand who those survivors are, why those survivors survived deplatforming, and how their behavior changed after de-platforming.




References:

Ali, S., Saeed, M. H., Aldreabi, E., Blackburn, J., De Cristofaro, E., Zannettou, S., & Stringhini, G. (2021, June). Understanding the effect of deplatforming on social networks. In 13th ACM Web Science Conference 2021 (pp. 187-195).

Aliapoulios, M., Bevensee, E., Blackburn, J., Bradlyn, B., De Cristofaro, E., Stringhini, G., & Zannettou, S. (2021). An early look at the parler online social network. arXiv preprint arXiv:2101.03820.

Zhang, Y., Chen, F., & Rohe, K. (2022). Social media public opinion as flocks in a murmuration: Conceptualizing and measuring opinion expression on social media. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 27(1), zmab021.

Authors

• Yunkang Yang

• Yini Zhang

• Josephine Lukito, University of Texas at Austin

• Sang Jung Kim, University of Iowa

• Jiyoun Suk, University of Connecticut

• Jordan Foley, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Porismita Borah