Legislators and policymakers worldwide are debating options for suppressing illegal, harmful and undesirable material online. Drawing on several quantitative datasets, we show that deplatforming an active community to suppress online hate and harassment, even with a substantial collective effort involving several tech firms, can be hard. Our case study is the disruption of the largest and longest-running harassment forum Kiwi Farms in late 2022, which is probably the most extensive industry effort to date. We collected complete snapshots of this site and its primary competitor Lolcow Farm, encompassing over 14.7M posts during their lifespan over the past decade. These data are supplemented with a full scrape of the Telegram channel used to disseminate new updates when the forum was down, tweets made by the online community leading the takedown, and search interest and web traffic to the forum spanning two months before and four months after the event. Despite the active participation of several tech firms over a few months, this campaign failed to shut down the forum and remove its objectionable content. While briefly raising public awareness, it led to rapid platform displacement and traffic fragmentation. Part of the activity decamped to Telegram, while traffic shifted from the primary domain to previously abandoned alternatives. The community leading the campaign lost interest quickly, traffic was directed back to the main domain, users quickly returned, and the forum was back online and became even more connected. The net effect was that forum activity, active users, threads, posts and traffic were all cut by about half. Deplatforming a dispersed community using a series of court orders against individual service providers appears unlikely to be very effective if the censor cannot incapacitate the key maintainers, whether by arresting them, enjoining them or otherwise deterring them.

翻译：全球立法者和政策制定者正在讨论如何抑制网络上的非法、有害及不良内容。基于多个定量数据集，我们表明，即使多家科技公司投入大量集体努力，封锁活跃社群以压制网络仇恨与骚扰也绝非易事。本研究以2022年底对规模最大、存续时间最长的骚扰论坛Kiwi Farms的瓦解行动为案例，这可能是迄今为止行业最大规模的打击行动。我们收集了该网站及其主要竞争对手Lolcow Farm的完整快照，涵盖过去十年间其存续期内超过1470万条帖子。这些数据辅以论坛下线期间用于传播新动态的Telegram频道的完整抓取、主导下架行动的在线社区发布的推文，以及事件前后两个月至四个月的论坛搜索兴趣和网络流量数据。尽管多家科技公司数月来积极参与，此次行动未能关闭该论坛并移除其不当内容。虽然短暂提升了公众意识，但此举导致平台迅速迁移和流量碎片化。部分活动转移至Telegram，而流量从主要域名转向此前被弃用的替代站点。主导行动社群的关注度迅速消退，流量重新流向主域名，用户迅速回归，论坛恢复在线且互联性甚至更强。净效应是论坛活动、活跃用户、主题帖、帖子及流量均削减约一半。如果审查者无法通过逮捕、禁止或以其他方式威慑关键维护者，则通过针对个体服务提供商的一系列法院命令来封锁分散化社群的效果似乎十分有限。