(Jewish Group) How to fight far-right extremism? New ADL report suggests targeting their websites
Pressuring social media sites and other internet-based services to remove vocal antisemites and other extremists is an effective way to limit their reach, according to a new Anti-Defamation League report.
The report, written by ADL Center for Technology and Society Belfer fellow Megan Squire, analyzed four examples of sites and internet personalities that had been deplatformed for their hateful content over the past few years. Among them were neo-Nazi site The Daily Stormer; The Donald, a website that started as a subreddit dedicated to Donald Trump that eventually morphed into the digital home for white supremacist rhetoric; 8chan and the white nationalist Nick Fuentes.
To see how deplatforming has affected web presence, Squire compared how sites were ranked in terms of popularity both before and after they were forced to move. To do that, she used tools like the Cisco Umbrella 1 Million, which tracks the top million most popular domains. Squire acknowledged that the data was imperfect as data like the actual number of visitors to those pages is not publicly available.
Even with that limitation, she was able to get a reasonably accurate measurement of where these sites stood in the internet zeitgeist both before being deplatformed and after.
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