Legislators and policymakers worldwide are debating options for suppressing illegal, harmful and undesirable material online. Drawing on several quantitative data sources, we show that deplatforming an active community to suppress online hate and harassment, even with a substantial concerted 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. Despite the active participation of a number of tech companies over several consecutive 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 forum experienced intermittent outages for several weeks, after which the community leading the campaign lost interest, traffic was directed back to the main domain, users quickly returned, and the forum was back online and became even more connected. The forum members themselves stopped discussing the incident shortly thereafter, and the net effect was that forum activity, active users, threads, posts and traffic were all cut by about half. Deplatforming a community without a court order raises philosophical issues about censorship versus free speech; ethical and legal issues about the role of industry in online content moderation; and practical issues on the efficacy of private-sector versus government action. 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：全球各地的立法者和政策制定者正在讨论如何压制在线非法、有害及不良内容。基于多个定量数据来源，我们表明，即使有数家科技公司大力协作，将活跃社区除名以压制在线仇恨与骚扰也可能相当困难。我们的案例研究是2022年末对最大且运营时间最长的骚扰论坛Kiwi Farms的破坏行动，这可能是迄今为止规模最大的行业努力。尽管多家科技公司在连续数月内积极参与，这一行动未能关闭该论坛或移除其不良内容。虽然短暂提高了公众意识，却导致了平台快速迁移和流量碎片化。部分活动转移至Telegram，同时流量从主域名转向先前被弃用的替代域名。该论坛经历了数周的间歇性中断，此后领导行动的社区失去兴趣，流量重新导向主域名，用户迅速回归，论坛重新上线且连接性更强。论坛成员本人此后不久便停止讨论该事件，净效果是论坛活动、活跃用户、帖子、发文及流量均削减约一半。在无法院命令的情况下将社区除名，引发了关于审查与言论自由的哲学问题；关于行业在在线内容审核中角色的伦理与法律问题；以及关于私营部门与政府行动效力的实践问题。若审查者无法通过逮捕、禁令或其他威慑手段使关键维护者失去能力，则使用一系列针对个体服务提供商的法院命令来除名分散的社区似乎不太可能非常有效。