Legislators and policymakers worldwide are debating options for suppressing
illegal, harmful and undesirable material online. Drawing on several
quantitative datasets, we show that deplatforming an active community to
suppress online hate and harassment, even with a substantial collective 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. We collected complete
snapshots of this site and its primary competitor Lolcow Farm, encompassing
over 14.7M posts during their lifespan over the past decade. These data are
supplemented with a full scrape of the Telegram channel used to disseminate new
updates when the forum was down, tweets made by the online community leading
the takedown, and search interest and web traffic to the forum spanning two
months before and four months after the event. Despite the active participation
of several tech firms over a few 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 community leading the
campaign lost interest quickly, traffic was directed back to the main domain,
users quickly returned, and the forum was back online and became even more
connected. The net effect was that forum activity, active users, threads, posts
and traffic were all cut by about half. 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