GEIS Lead Cody Buntain and co-author Maria Snegovaya published the paper Post-January 6 deplatforming shows long-term effects on ideological polarization among Twitter users in PNAS Nexus, offering new insight into how platform moderation decisions influence online ideological distance over time.
“Deplatforming” has been a common content-moderation strategy, yet studies on its efficacy have found mixed results. Our study provides new insights by examining individual-level impact of Twitter’s “Great Deplatforming” in January 2021. Previous studies of deplatforming around this event have mainly focused either on aggregated online behavior or on users already active on alternative platforms. Our study instead investigates differential effects among Twitter users from across the ideological spectrum gathered from a survey of political attitudes. This study also contextualizes results on Twitter through a controlled comparison against behavior on a different platform, i.e. Reddit. This analysis is important to the larger context of content moderation and yields better insight into expected effects of deplatforming in a politically contentious context.
Link: https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/4/11/pgaf333/8299825
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/171JnHg1Ju/
Twitter: https://x.com/PNASNexus/status/1991959976521183260
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7397725694136426496
BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/pnasnexus.org/post/3m6634etoqk2g
