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：立法者和政策制定者全球范围内正在讨论抑制在线非法、有害及不良内容的方案。基于多项定量数据源，我们表明，即使多家科技公司协同采取实质性努力，驱逐活跃社区以压制在线仇恨与骚扰也可能困难重重。我们的案例研究针对2022年末对规模最大、运行时间最长的骚扰论坛Kiwi Farms的破坏行动，这可能是迄今为止最广泛的行业努力。尽管多家科技公司连续数月积极参与，该行动未能关闭论坛并移除其令人反感的内容。虽然短暂提升了公众意识，却导致平台快速迁移和流量碎片化。部分活动转移至Telegram，而流量从主要域名流向先前被遗弃的替代域名。该论坛经历了数周的间歇性中断，之后领导行动的社区丧失兴趣，流量重新导向主域名，用户迅速返回，论坛恢复在线且连接性更强。论坛成员不久后便停止讨论此事件，净效果是论坛活动、活跃用户、帖子、发帖及流量均减少了约一半。在没有法院命令的情况下驱逐社区，引发了关于审查与言论自由的哲学问题；行业在在线内容审核中角色的伦理与法律问题；以及私营部门与政府行动效力的实际问题。如果审查者无法通过逮捕、禁止或威慑等方式使关键维护者失效，那么利用一系列法院命令针对个别服务提供商来驱逐分散的社区，似乎难以非常有效。