Deplatforming Backfired
Progressive censors failed to suppress our political demons. It's finally time to confront them.
When Donald Trump was kicked off social media in 2021, liberal pundit Matthew Yglesias tweeted, "It's kinda weird that deplatforming Trump just like completely worked with no visible downside whatsoever." Two years later, Fox News fired Tucker Carlson, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) celebrated that "deplatforming works," though she worried about the long-term implications.
"I also kind of feel like I'm waiting for the cut scene at the end of a Marvel movie after all the credits have rolled, and then you like see the villain's hand reemerge," said Ocasio-Cortez.
As it turns out, every major star gets a sequel. Trump is back in the White House, and Carlson has a bigger audience than ever before.
What we've learned is that deplatforming doesn't work.
In 2021, I published a video at Reason predicting this backfire effect, comparing the media ecosystem to Freud's theory of the unconscious:
Sigmund Freud theorized that when thoughts or experiences are repressed, they inevitably resurface in more deranged and damaging forms. When our dominant communication platforms seek to repress widely held beliefs and opinions, those beliefs and opinions aren't likely to simply disappear but rather reemerge elsewhere.
What we've learned since the Great Deplatforming of 2021, and the subsequent rise of extremist commentators like Nick Fuentes, is that the best way to exorcise our demons is to confront them head-on.
The Platform Wars
It's understandable why progressives thought they'd won the platform wars in the early 2020s. Remember when Amazon Web Services deplatformed Parler, the right-wing social media network? Or when Facebook suppressed and Twitter blocked a completely accurate New York Post story about Hunter Biden's laptop?
Remember when the New York Times' Kevin Roose wanted President Joe Biden to appoint a "reality czar," and for a moment it looked like that was actually going to happen?
Remember when scientists from elite institutions were shadow banned for expressing opinions about COVID-19 that turned out to be correct? Or when the Stanford economist and physician Jay Bhattacharya had his Twitter account secretly throttled for, among other things, saying that the lockdowns were counterproductive?
Back then, things were looking pretty bleak for those of us who still subscribe to John Perry Barlow's idealistic 1996 vision of the internet as a place "where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity."
And then, three years ago, Elon Musk bought Twitter and everything changed.
Self-described free speech "absolutist" Musk invited journalists to examine the "Twitter Files," exposing how the federal government had coerced private companies to suppress critical speech. That's how we learned that Bhattacharya's Twitter account had been secretly throttled.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director, Francis Collins, had called Bhattacharya a "fringe epidemiologist," requesting a "quick and devastating" takedown of his heretical views.
Bhattacharya ended up taking Collins' job as director of the NIH. And Martin Kulldorff, a Harvard professor fired for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine, is now chief science officer for U.S. Health and Human Services.
The "villain's hand" Ocasio-Cortez worried about not only reemerged, but has a full grip on the levers of power.
Musk replaced Twitter's third-party establishment sources serving as "fact checkers" with the community writ large. When Biden tweeted that "the 28th Amendment is the law of the land," a community note was appended observing that the 28th Amendment doesn't exist. The New York Post had its account restored after it was vindicated on the Hunter Biden laptop story, although it did get a community note for sharing a fake bigfoot video.
The success of this crowd-sourced approach to fact-checking inspired Mark Zuckerberg to adopt a similar system.
"I was really worried from the beginning about basically becoming this sort of decider of what is true in the world," Zuckerberg said on The Joe Rogan Experience in January. "That's, like, kind of a crazy position to be in for billions of people using your service."
Community notes is a 21st-century instantiation of John Stuart Mill's concept of a marketplace of ideas, where thinkers clash, compete, and arrive at a consensus. It's a superior method for getting at the truth than simply trusting institutional gatekeepers.
"When people who usually disagree on something agree, they get higher ranked," Zuckerberg explained. "You're showing more information, not less."
The vibe shift was real. Banned accounts were reinstated. A different type of content began to dominate X's "For You" algorithm.
And people started to share their real preferences.
Private Truths, Public Lies
In his 1995 book Private Truths, Public Lies, Duke University political scientist Timur Kuran introduced the concept of "preference falsification," where individuals tend to suppress their unpopular beliefs to avoid negative social consequences. As fewer people express them, these "private truths" become even more forbidden, and many people end up convincing themselves to believe in "public lies" to resolve the cognitive dissonance.
Preference falsification "is the misrepresentation of our wants in the interest of improving our reputation to avoid being stigmatized, to avoid being excluded," says Kuran.
But once enough people feel free to speak honestly, those suppressed beliefs can erupt in a "preference cascade."
Kuran cites Václav Havel's essay, "The Power of the Powerless," which tells the story of a greengrocer who puts a sign in his window that says, "Workers of the World Unite!" in communist Czechoslovakia, not because he believed the slogan, but to remain "in harmony with society."
The greengrocer's sign "exemplifies a performative ritual that signals to the communist state or the communist party that you are going to play along even if you have some doubts in your mind," says Kuran.
But every once in a while, a shock to the system allows for widely held but suppressed beliefs to break through, resulting in a "preference cascade." Kuran points to the fall of the Berlin Wall as a classic case.
"Millions of communists were paying lip service to the idea that the communist world was outpacing the free world, and when enough people felt free to express themselves truthfully, huge numbers of others followed," says Kuran.
Preference cascades can occur in democratic societies as well. Kuran believes that when Musk made "likes" on X private, the "public lies" receded and people's real preferences started to surface. When progressives—including AOC—quietly removed the pronouns in their social media bios, it was kind of like the greengrocer pulling down his sign.
"Pronoun use is a performative ritual," says Kuran. "It is essentially signaling that you're fine with the 'woke' agenda, and to the extent that you have reservations, you are gonna go along with it. It buys you some rewards among one side in the culture wars."
The free and open internet was back. "Governments of the industrial world…leave us alone," wrote John Perry Barlow. "I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us."
Barlow prophesied that when "anyone, anywhere may express his beliefs," it would lead to a more "humane" world. That may be true, but free speech also means tolerating the ugly side of humanity.
The Fuentes Dilemma
Nick Fuentes is an unapologetic white nationalist and antisemite.
"Jews are running society. Women need to shut the fuck up. Blacks need to be imprisoned for the most part, and we would live in paradise. It's that simple," he once declared on his nightly livestream.
He mocks the Holocaust and has called for "perfidious Jews," "occultists," and atheists to be "given the death penalty."
In October, Tucker Carlson brought Fuentes on his podcast for a chat. Carlson didn't confront Fuentes with any of his past inflammatory statements or bother to probe him when he mentioned an admiration for Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, but he did push back against Fuentes' fixation on Jewish and white identity politics.
"What I do think is bad, just objectively bad and destructive, is the 'all Jews are guilty' or 'all anybody is guilty' of anything because that's just, like, not true. And we don't believe that as Christians," said Carlson.
Fuentes agreed that "as a Catholic" he is commanded to "love all people" but dismissed the idea that identity politics is a bad thing because "identity is a reality."
In the old days, YouTube would have pulled this interview down. Instead, it's got 6.7 million views and counting.
When conservatives criticized Carlson for his softball interview, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts appealed to their tribal loyalty.
"The American people expect us to be focusing on our political adversaries on the Left, not our friends on the Right," Roberts said in a statement posted to X.
The Heritage Foundation's board of trustees and staff went into open revolt. Roberts ended up firing his chief of staff and apologizing at an all-staff meeting.
"I made a mistake, and I let you down, and I let down this institution, and I am sorry for that," said Roberts.
Senior Research Fellow Robert Rector, a 47-year veteran of Heritage, advised his boss to emulate William F. Buckley Jr. "You have to expunge all antisemitism—all of it. But that's just part of it. The other is, you have to expel the lunatics," he said.
The New Right, an Old Fight
In 1962, Buckley, who was the founder and editor in chief of National Review, famously booted the anticommunist John Birch Society from the modern conservative movement.
Buckley made his decision after the John Birch Society's founder, Robert Welch, theorized that "Communist influences…completely controlled" President Dwight D. Eisenhower, whom he accused of "treason," and that former World War 2 general and Defense Secretary George C. Marshall was "a dedicated agent of the Soviet conspiracy" who had facilitated the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
Buckley denounced Welch and the Birchers as "far removed from common sense" and worked to marginalize them for embarrassing the broader conservative movement with their unhinged pamphlets and for disrupting town halls, school board meetings, and Republican events.
In 1962, magazine editors like Buckley were gatekeepers to the public; on today's open internet, neither Roberts nor any other conservative leader has that kind of power.
That's why Fuentes continues to grow in influence, and his supporters—the Groypers—continue haunting conservative events and heckling major figures like Glenn Beck for their support of Israel.
There's no Bill Buckley to police the right any longer in the digital age, but another episode in which the public face of American conservatism acted as gatekeeper can help us to understand the hazards of deplatforming and why we should be thankful that cancellation is no longer so easy, Fuentes' newfound popularity notwithstanding.
Like Kevin Roberts from Heritage, Buckley had to contend with antisemitism in his movement.
In the 1980s, National Review writer Joe Sobran's columns called Israel "the most powerful lobby in America," and he praised "a little magazine" published by a white supremacist as the only one "that faces the hard facts about race," though he later clarified that he wasn't endorsing outright racism.
The neocon power couple Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter accused Sobran of antisemitism in his critique of Israel, which Sobran says was just a tactic to silence him.
"I criticize all kinds of special interest lobbies, as most conservatives do," said Sobran in a 1986 C-Span interview. "The difference is that I've taken on several ethnic lobbies in ways others don't like to, the black and Jewish ones in particular, but also the gay ones and the feminist ones. Now as soon as you start doing that, you open yourself up to a kind of ad hominem argument that's still legitimate for some reason."
Buckley cut ties with Sobran in 1993, after he blamed Israel for America's entanglement in the Gulf War. Sobran said Buckley tried to portray him as suffering moral and medical "incapacitation."
Some conservatives also accused presidential candidate Pat Buchanan of antisemitism after he called the U.S. Congress "Israeli-occupied territory."
In 1992, Buckley published a short book titled In Search of Anti-Semitism, addressing the Sobran and Buchanan controversies.
"I find it impossible to defend Pat Buchanan against the charge that what he did and said during the period under examination amounted to antisemitism," said Buckley in a later presentation on the book. "Whatever it was that drove him to say and do it, most probably an iconoclastic temperament, I still cannot find it in my heart to say that Buchanan is personally antisemitic, but he definitely is politically so."
We should criticize racism and antisemitism when we see it, but Buckley's approach ultimately stifled debate on the topics of America's military and financial support of Israel. Because Israel relied heavily on U.S. support for its defense, Buckley claimed that opposition to that support is antisemitic, which is wrong.
"Isn't it possible to oppose Israel and yet still be free of the taint of antisemitism?" asks Buckley rhetorically, before answering himself. "In the absence of definitive military aid by the United States, the probabilities are higher that Israel would be extinguished. It will follow that any American president unwilling to support Israel militarily would be inviting the elimination of the Jewish state and its people."
Buckley's indirectness didn't help. Sobran rightly called out his florid rhetoric as too often "pure gesture" with little meaning. Buckley left the conservative movement with an inexcusable moral confusion about the difference between real antisemitism and legitimate foreign policy disagreement.
It helps explain why some conservatives today are disingenuously branding Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.) as an antisemite for his principled opposition to U.S. support for Israel or any other foreign country.
And it explains Ben Shapiro's past vilification of Ron Paul as gripping his pen on the debate stage "as he would the neck of a Joo." Podcaster and comedian Dave Smith, who also chatted with Fuentes on his show, told Tucker Carlson on a podcast reflecting on their conversations with Fuentes that smearing foreign policy critics like Paul instead of engaging with their arguments helps explain the emergence of the Groypers.
"I got to tell you, there's a little part of me that almost goes like, 'Hey, you said that about Ron Paul. Then you know what, Ben Shapiro? You get Nick Fuentes,'" said Smith.
Our Post-Deplatforming Reality
There is no contemporary figure of Buckley's stature to gate-keep the right. There's not even really a gate to close. An ungated digital arena results in messier discourse, but ultimately, we're better off without "trust and safety" teams attempting to manage the discourse with unelected federal bureaucrats nudging them to suppress politically inconvenient narratives.
And the "villain's hand" AOC fretted over has grasped onto the side of the building. Today, Buckley's enemies have largely overtaken National Review conservatism.
Trump's agenda looks a lot more like Buchanan's than Buckley's, and Fuentes is both a critic of Israel and an antisemitic racist.
Buckley sidelined former contributor Murray Rothbard at National Review over his noninterventionism, penning a snide obituary in which he called the libertarian economist a man of "defective judgment" who "couldn't handle moral priorities."
Had Buckley instead better engaged with Rothbard's ideas about noninterventionism, the evils of central banking, and the corrupting impact of government money printing, the modern conservative movement would be stronger.
In his obit, Buckley exulted that Rothbard ended up with about "as many disciples as David Koresh had in his little redoubt in Waco." Today, Rothbard's followers, including Dave Smith, have made him arguably more influential than Buckley. And as a libertarian, I'm happy to see Buchanan and Rothbard's case for noninterventionism taken seriously, even as I oppose the protectionist and anti-immigration sentiments along for the ride.
The marketplace of ideas remains as valid and vital a notion as ever in the digital age. But like in any marketplace, there are hucksters and fraudsters peddling harmful wares with dubious advertisements.
But what of the fear that young conservatives today are overexposed to figures like Nick Fuentes by algorithms that serve them nothing to seriously counter him?
The Tyranny of the Intolerant
F.A. Hayek warned of a road to serfdom, where well-intentioned efforts to expand the power of government to address social ills would lead to authoritarian control. Kuran warns about "another road to serfdom" that could emerge from the chaos of our fractured media landscape: the tyranny of the intolerant.
"Intolerant communities thrive in the presence of other intolerant communities, especially those intolerant of them," writes Kuran. "They exclude aggressively because they themselves are excluded. They hate because they are hated. They censor because their own views are dismissed, mocked, and suppressed."
Kuran suspects the rise of the anti-liberal right is a direct response to the censorious and dehumanizing attitudes on the Left, pointing to Hillary Clinton's famous "basket of deplorables" comment as an inflection point in the discourse.
Clinton "told Americans that their views should not be taken into account, should not been respected, that they're coming from some dark place, they're deplorable," says Kuran. "And it re-emphasized to them that, if Clinton won, they would have no voice in government. Their concerns would not be respected."
Kuran writes that those determined to "cleanse the discourse" through heavy-handed speech regulation "galvanize the very processes responsible for turning legitimate democratic power into dictatorship" by creating an increasingly zero-sum game.
"It's very dangerous for democracy because if elections turn into an existential matter, both sides are going to try to rig it if they can," says Kuran.
The intolerant thrive in today's digital "echo chambers," a well-worn concept that Kuran refines into something called the "availability chamber," which doesn't simply expose participants to likeminded views to exclusion of all else, but spaces that aggressively push out a "steady barrage of clips or opinions that show how terrible, how subhuman your opponents are" to "fill you with outrage constantly."
On the right, this might manifest in amplifying leftists who cheer the murder of Charlie Kirk or schoolteachers who say outrageous things on TikTok as if they aren't outliers.
Buckley worried that the John Birch Society served this purpose for the left. His biographer Sam Tanenhouse wrote that "the trouble [with John Birch Society founder Robert Welch wasn't his] actual influence, but his perceived influence. Liberals, especially liberals in the media, were taking him seriously—or at least pretending to as a way of damaging them all."
Fuentes is a similar cudgel against the right today, with The New York Times publishing nine pieces about him and the Groypers since September. Some of his popularity may be an illusion. One recent study of his social media presence discovered a network of anonymous accounts quickly retweeting all of his content, implying manipulation "by actors coordinating in unison."
Still, in the post-deplatforming world, Carlson is right that we can't simply ignore intolerant movements like the Groypers and hope they go away.
"I decided Nick Fuentes can't be cancelled. They've been trying since he was a freshman in college. It doesn't work. In fact, he's gotten bigger," Carlson told Smith in a podcast recapping their respective conversations with Fuentes. "He's the most influential voice for men under 30 in the United States."
Engaging with Fuentes is unlikely to change his mind, judging from his recent media appearances, and you can't deplatform him. One approach is to expose how immature and vapid he really is, as Piers Morgan recently did when he asked Fuentes what he meant by saying that "Hitler is very cool." Fuentes replied, "The uniforms. The parades. It's cool as a guy."
But the best approach in the welcome absence of aggressive social media moderation is self-moderation.
The Virtue of Moderation
Edmund Burke, the leading philosopher of the conservative movement, called moderation "the virtue only of superior minds" in a letter critiquing the outcome of the bloody French Revolution. Moderation "requires a deep courage" most especially when an "unthinking public" is pulled towards "splendid and perilous extremes."
To preserve our liberty in this unmoderated digital world, we must regularly calibrate our own "attention chambers" and beware the allure of "perilous extremes."
What are the private truths we dare not utter in the presence of the in-group? What are the public lies we repeat to impress? Are we exposing ourselves to the best arguments from the "other side"?
Here's a tell: Is your favorite commentator constantly talking about what "they" want to do to you? Who is "they"?
In the post-deplatforming world, it's easy to let an algorithm overserve us on what it's learned we like, which all too often is a disdain for "them." It's up to you to recalibrate it now and then.
Deplatforming doesn't work. So let's learn how to have real conversations and to defend our beliefs with reason, not by pointing out that the other side is so deplorably evil that the only recourse is to silence it by any means necessary.
