Posted on April 1, 2022

Social Media Censorship and Cancel Culture Increase Extremism: Study

Nihal Krishan, Washington Examiner, March 28, 2022

Major social media platforms’ strict content moderation and censorship policies are making people more isolated and polarized, causing more dangerous extremism in society, a new study shows.

Tech giants such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google are facing all-time highs in hate speech and misinformation, with such content increasing twentyfold between 2017 to 2021 on Facebook, suggesting that the company’s approach to censorship doesn’t work, according to a new study conducted by Daryl Davis, a race relations expert, and Bill Ottman, a free speech activist and CEO of crypto social network Minds.

The study, which was edited by Dr. Nafees Hamid, a senior research fellow on radicalization at King’s College London, among other academics, examined the effects of restricting extremist content from large-scale social media platforms by looking at the behavior of extremist groups, among them white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and Islamic extremists.

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The study also showed that censorship does not reduce hate speech or violence-inducing misinformation but merely moves it to other corners of the internet.

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Ottman concluded that “we feel that our research justifies more of a First Amendment-based content moderation policy with more free speech that in the long run, over years, would lead to less radicalization and violence.”