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就如何抑制在线非法、有害及不良内容展开辩论。基于多个定量数据来源，我们揭示了即便多家科技公司协同采取重大行动，去平台化活跃社区以抑制在线仇恨与骚扰的目标仍难以实现。本文案例研究聚焦于2022年末对规模最大、存续时间最长的骚扰论坛Kiwi Farms的瓦解行动，这可能是迄今为止行业内规模最大的协同努力。尽管多家科技公司连续数月积极参与，该行动未能成功关闭论坛并移除其不良内容。虽然短暂提升了公众意识，但此举导致了平台快速迁移与流量碎片化。部分活动转移至Telegram，而流量则从主域名转向之前被废弃的替代域名。论坛经历了数周的间歇性宕机后，主导此次行动的社区兴趣消退，流量重新流向主域名，用户迅速回归，论坛恢复上线并实现了更强的互联性。论坛成员随后很快停止讨论该事件，最终净效果是论坛活动、活跃用户、主题帖、帖子及流量均减少约一半。未经法院命令而去平台化社区，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践问题。如果审查者无法通过逮捕、禁止或其他威慑手段使关键维护者失去行动能力，那么通过针对个体服务提供者的一系列法院命令来去平台化分散的社区，似乎难以取得显著成效。