The Systemic Impact of Deplatforming on Social Media: Discussion & Conclusion

Table of Links

Abstract and Introduction

Results

Discussion & Conclusion

Methods

Acknowledgements, Data availability, and References

DISCUSSION & CONCLUSION

In this paper, we have analysed self-declared user-level matched data to study the ban-induced platform migration from Twitter to Gettr. First, we showed that the banned cohort of users deplatformed from Twitter are more active on Gettr, and have higher platform retention, than the matched cohort who remain active on Twitter. Second, we revealed that Gettr content primarily discusses themes relevant to the US political right. Topics overepresented on Gettr are known to have resulted in account suspensions on Twitter. Third, we showed that the matched and banned cohorts share the same politically homogeneous Gettr audience. Fourth, we found that matched users are more toxic on Twitter than they are on Gettr, and that these toxic tweets often directly mention political opponents. Finally, we highlighted Gettr’s broader societal impact, revealing significant structural changes in the Gettr interaction network in the run-up to the Bras´ılia insurrections.

The fact that the banned and matched cohorts appear similar in every regard, apart from their activity and retention on Gettr, is evidence of the systemic impact of deplatforming. Fringe platforms offer a safe haven where deplatformed users are free to capitalise on their supporters following suspension from Twitter. However, in this politically homogeneous environment, users are essentially confined to an ideological “echo-platform” [43, 44] where they cannot engage and confront their political opponents. Our results hint that this ability to interact with opponents may be part of Twitter’s appeal for farright social media users, although more work is needed to fully clarify this observation.

When users are banned from mainstream platforms, they become wholly dependent on fringe alternatives. This poses a societal risk since fringe platforms can facilitate the emergence of radical narratives and the spread of hate speech [9, 20, 70–72]. A lack of monitoring can, therefore, mean that signs of collective upheaval are missed. The Bras´ılia insurrection is a clear example of this. Critically, these considerations are not only relevant for mainstream platforms, whose policies have received the most scrutiny, but for the whole social media ecosystem. Despite branding itself as a free speech platform, Gettr has also deplatformed users for posting radical content, most notably the white supremacist Nicholas Fuentes [73].

It is important to contextualise the scope of our findings, whose limitations are avenues for future work. First, the current study only considers the migration from Twitter to Gettr, since users of other platforms do not declare their Twitter use as standard. If data becomes available, future work should extend scrutiny to other platforms. Second, the Gettr matching feature only applies to verified users, a subset of the users who migrated from Twitter to Gettr. Analysing non-verified users migrating across platforms would clarify the differential impact of deplatforming on content creators as opposed to consumers. Finally, we cannot study tweets from the banned cohort since this data is not publicly available. Analysing this content would explain why some users are deplatformed, but others are not.

Overall, our study highlights how Gettr struggles to compete with Twitter when users have free choice to use either platform. However, the decision by Twitter to deplatform a user impacts how those users view Gettr as an alternative. We anticipate that future work will build on these observations and speculate that other fringe platforms will likely show a similar dependence on their mainstream competitors. This work is urgently needed given the risks posed to democracy by poorly regulated social media [74, 75].