The trust one must place in the creator of a blocklist is enormous, because the most dangerous failure mode isn’t that it doesn’t block who it says it does, but that it blocks who it says it doesn’t and they just disappear.

In the wake of Charlottesville, corporations grappled with the role they played in supporting white supremacists organizing online (Robertson 2017). After the attack in Charlottesville and another later in Pittsburgh in October 2018, in which a gunman opened fire on the Tree of Life synagogue, there was a wave of deplatforming and corporate denial of service (Koebler 2018; Lorenz 2018), spanning cloud service companies (Liptak 2018), domain registrars (Romano 2017), app stores (O’Connor 2017) and payment servicers (Terdiman 2017). While some debate the cause and consequences of deplatforming specific far-right individuals on social media platforms, we need to know more about how to remove and limit the spread of extremist and white supremacist websites (Nouri, Lorenzo-Dus and Watkin 2019).

They can spew hate amongst themselves for eternity, but without amplification it won’t thrive.

"I am really pleased to see different sites deciding not to privilege aggressors' speech over their targets'," Phillips said. "That tends to be the default position in so many online 'free speech' debates which suggest that if you restrict aggressors' speech, you're doing a disservice to America—a position that doesn't take into account the fact that antagonistic speech infringes on the speech of those who are silenced by that kind of abuse."

“We need to puncture this myth that it’s only affecting far-right people. Trans rights activists, Black Lives Matter organizers, LGBTQI people have been demonetized or deranked. The reason we’re talking about far-right people is that they have coverage on Fox News and representatives in Congress holding hearings. They already have political power.”

Deplatforming works “best” when the people being deplatformed don’t have any power to begin with.