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Deplatforming Norm-Violating Influencers on Social Media Reduces Overall Online Attention Toward Them by Ribeiro, Manoel Horta; Jhaver, Shagun; Martinell, Jordi Cluet i; Reignier-Tayar, Marie; West, Robert is a scholarly article available to read on EtoBox.

What is Deplatforming Norm-Violating Influencers on Social Media Reduces Overall Online Attention Toward Them about?

From politicians to podcast hosts, online platforms have systematically banned (``deplatformed'') influential users for breaking platform guidelines. Previous inquiries on the effectiveness of this intervention are inconclusive because 1) they consider only few deplatforming events; 2) they consider only overt engagement traces (e.g., likes and posts) but not passive engagement (e.g., views); 3) they do not consider all the potential places users impacted by the deplatforming event might migrate to. We address these limitations in a longitudinal, quasi-experimental study of 165 deplatforming events targeted at 101 influencers. We collect deplatforming events from Reddit posts and then manually curate the data, ensuring the correctness of a large dataset of deplatforming events. Then, we link these events to Google Trends and Wikipedia page views, platform-agnostic measures of online attention that capture the general public's interest in specific influencers. Through a difference-in-differences approach, we find that deplatforming reduces online attention toward influencers. After 12 months, we estimate that online attention toward deplatformed influencers is reduced by -63% (95% C

Author

Ribeiro, Manoel Horta; Jhaver, Shagun; Martinell, Jordi Cluet i; Reignier-Tayar, Marie; West, Robert

Published

2024

Language

EN