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：世界各地的立法者和政策制定者正在就如何抑制网络非法、有害及不良内容展开辩论。基于多项定量数据来源，我们表明，即使有多家科技公司协同努力，对活跃社区进行去平台化以遏制网络仇恨与骚扰仍可能相当困难。我们的案例研究是2022年底对规模最大、持续时间最长的骚扰论坛Kiwi Farms的打击行动——这可能是迄今为止行业内最广泛的协作行动。尽管多家科技公司在连续数月内积极参与，此次行动仍未能关闭该论坛或移除其不良内容。虽短暂提升了公众意识，但行动迅速导致平台转移与流量碎片化：部分活动迁至Telegram，流量从主域名转向此前废弃的备选域名。论坛经历了数周的间歇性瘫痪，此后主导行动的用户群体丧失兴趣，流量重新回归主域名，用户迅速回流，论坛恢复在线甚至互联性更强。论坛成员本身也在不久后停止讨论该事件，净效果是论坛活动量、活跃用户数、主题数、发帖量与流量均削减约一半。未获法院命令而进行的社区去平台化，引发了关于审查与言论自由的哲学争议、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实效性的实践考量。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丧失能力，则针对分散化社区、通过一系列法院命令对个体服务提供商实施去平台化，似乎难以取得显著成效。