Authors:
(1) Anh V. Vu, University of Cambridge, Cambridge Cybercrime Centre ([email protected]);
(2) Alice Hutchings, University of Cambridge, Cambridge Cybercrime Centre ([email protected]);
(3) Ross Anderson, University of Cambridge, and University of Edinburgh ([email protected]).
Table of Links
2. Deplatforming and the Impacts
2.2. The Kiwi Farms Disruption
3. Methods, Datasets, and Ethics, and 3.1. Forum and Imageboard Discussions
3.2. Telegram Chats and 3.3. Web Traffic and Search Trends Analytics
3.4. Tweets Made by the Online Community and 3.5. Data Licensing
4. The Impact on Forum Activity and Traffic, and 4.1. The Impact of Major Disruptions
5. The Impacts on Relevant Stakeholders and 5.1. The Community that Started the Campaign
6. Tensions, Challenges, and Implications and 6.1. The Efficacy of the Disruption
6.2. Censorship versus Free Speech
6.3. The Role of Industry in Content Moderation
6.5. Limitations and Future Work
7. Conclusion, Acknowledgments, and References
7. Conclusion
Online communities may not only act as a discussion place but provide mutual support for members who share common values. For some, it may be where they hang out; for others, it may become part of their identity. Legislators who propose to ban an online community might consider precedents such as Britain’s ban on Provisional Sinn Fein from 1988– ´ 94 due to its support for the Provisional IRA during the Troubles, or the bans on the Muslim Brotherhood enacted by various Arab regimes.[14] Declaring a community to be illegal and thus forcing it underground may foster paranoid worldviews, increase signals associated with toxicity and radicalisation [45], [33] and have many other unintended consequences. The KIWI FARMS disruption, which involved a substantial concerted effort by the industry, is perhaps the best outcome that could be expected even if the censor were agile, competent and persistent. Yet this has demonstrated that merely attempting to deplatform an active standalone online community is not enough to deal effectively with hate and harassment, especially as the attempt failed to arrest, exhaust, or otherwise incapacitate the forum’s maintainer.
We believe the harm and threats associated with online hate communities may justify action despite the right to free speech. But within the framework of the EU and the Council of Europe which is based on the European Convention on Human Rights, such action will have to be justified as proportionate, necessary and in accordance with the law. It is unlikely that taking down a whole community or arresting its maintainer because of a crime committed by a single member can be proportionate. For a takedown to be justified as necessary, it must also be effective, and this case study shows how high a bar that could be. For a takedown to be in accordance with the law, it cannot simply be a response to public pressure. There must be a law or regulation that determines predictably whether a specific piece of content is illegal, and a judge or other neutral finder of fact would have to be involved.
The last time a Labour government won power in Britain, it won on a promise to be ‘Tough on Crime, and Tough on the Causes of Crime’. Some scholars of online abuse are now coming to a similar conclusion that the issue may demand a more nuanced approach [3], [62]: as well as the targeted removal of content that passes an objective threshold of illegality, the private sector and governments should collaborate to combine takedowns with measures such as education and psycho-social support [112]. And where the illegality involves violence, it is even more vital to work with local police forces and social workers rather than just attacking the online symptoms [109].
There are multiple research programmes and field experiments to effectively detox young men from misogynistic attitudes, whether in youth clubs and other small groups, at the scale of schools, or even by gamifying the identification of propaganda that promotes hate. But most countries still lack a unifying strategy for violence reduction [113]. In both the US and the UK, for example, while incel-related violence against women falls under the formal definition of terrorism, it is excluded from police counterterrorism practice, and the politicisation of misogyny has made this a tussle space in which political leaders and police chiefs have difficulty in taking effective action. In turbulent debates, policymakers should first ask which tools are likely to work, and it is in this context that we offer the present case study.
Acknowledgments
We thank the anonymous reviewers and the shepherd for their insightful and constructive feedback. We are grateful to Richard Clayton, Alastair R. Beresford, Yi Ting Chua, Ben Collier, Tina Marjanov, Konstantinos Ioannidis, Daniel R. Thomas, and Ilia Shumailov for their invaluable comments. This work is supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 949127).
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Appendix A. Meta-Review
A.1. Summary
This paper examines the impact of large-scale industry disruption on the online harassment forum KIWI FARMS, as well as its competitor LOLCOW FARM. The authors use a variety of measurement techniques to show a net reduction of activity on the forum.
A.2. Scientific Contributions
• Independent confirmation of important results with limited prior research.
• Provides a new data set for public use.
• Provides a valuable step forward in an established field.
A.3. Reasons for Acceptance
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This paper provides a valuable step forward in the field of harassment measurement prevention by confirming important prior results. This paper examines deplatforming on an internet-wide scale, rather than focusing on one social network – a limitation of most prior work.
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This paper provides a new data set for public use. On request, the authors will provide a very detailed dataset of forum discussions with metadata, Telegram chats, web analytics, and relevant tweets, allowing independent confirmation and future research on harassment sites.
A.4. Noteworthy Concerns
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There is a significant lack of information about how the qualitative analysis of public announcements and press releases was conducted, which makes evaluation of that analysis challenging - details about reliability and how the coding process was done would be useful.
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The discussion does a good job of describing why deplatforming is hard, but does not offer much in the way of suggestions for making this problem easier beyond arresting the people responsible.
This paper is available on arxiv under CC BY 4.0 DEED license.
[14] During the Sinn Fein ban, it was illegal to transmit the voice or image ´ of their spokesmen in Britain, so the BBC and other TV stations employed actors to read the words of Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness.
