Deplatforming may work in some cases as a short term solution, but does not solve the problem entirely... If the person is an immediate threat, such as many perceive Donald Trump's rhetoric to have been, than it may do good to immediately limit the spread that person's reach. If the person is more of a long term, pestering problem, like Perez Hilton, it depends on the goal of deplatforming. When Hilton got banned from various social media outlets, he just moved to others, but it still reduced his spray. Milo Yiannopoulos, a far-right commentator, reported that he suffered financial hardship as a result of being banned from several social media platforms. This real life consequence may signal that people and organizations (who host speaking events, etc) followed suit and stopped supporting the problematic person. There is also the risk of simply driving those people to a different platform with less regulation, such as Parler and MeWe. It could also make that persons supporters even angrier and rally behind the deplatformed person as the victim of a censorship conspiracy.

**TL;DR - Deplatforming celebrities and public figures can work, but it depends on the context and the type of base.** Since deplatforming is synonyms with the term canceling, the concept is thrown around online like rapid-fire even for minor controversies making some skeptical whether we should cancel public figures. This leaves us with a spectrum with one end of the population believing that society should punish and deplatform public figures more frequently, and on the other believing deplatforming is censorship and does more harm than good. In the middle, we have the general majority who believes deplatforming is needed but only for specific actions that would be considered worst of the worst along with proof of ill-intent. These actions generally are racism, sexism, pedophilia, sexual misconduct, physical abuse, etc. Effective deplatforming (most of the time) happens when the general majority believes a public figure has done the worst actions. Kevin Spacey, Joss Whedon, and Harvey Weinstein were all effectively deplatformed, and their careers concluded in ruined. However, context also plays a role in preventing someone from getting deplatformed. An example of this is Johnny Depp, who reversed his cancellation after being accused of physical abuse towards his former partner Amber Heard. In this case, the context was that Heard was also accused of being abusive towards Depp, backed up with multiple accounts and witnesses. Heard's base thinks Depp was still abusive and refuses to take responsibility for his actions; Depp's base believes Heard orchestrated this to get money from Depp and support from the public. [The public now perceives this being mutual domestic abuse rather than Depp being the sole perpetrator.](https://www.insider.com/johnny-depp-amber-heard-relationship-timeline-2020-7) Although Depp is not generally supported by everyone today, it's safe to say he didn't get effectively canceled as his career goes on in upcoming movies. (Needless to say, I don't support anybody in this case) Deplatforming a public figure could also depend on their base since standards change depending on the audience. Compare James Charles, who lost millions of followers for being accused of not advertising her friend's beauty product in 2019, to Pewdiepie, who used Nazi imagery and anti-Semitic humor in 2017 and gained 50 million subscriptions on Youtube the following year. Deplatforming someone effectively means the base must stop showing their support. Difficulty increases with larger niche bases, and this is why political officials are tricky to deplatform if they are populists against the status quo like Donald Trump. He has a large base against the status quo and condemns whatever he considers liberal social values (This is why he gets away with being racist and not wearing masks). Since there's a split in the general majority in the United States and Trump's base values are opposed to whatever is considered proper social behavior, no amount of racism and sexism would've canceled Trump.

The case for deplatforming is a tricky issue when it comes to curbing the spread of misinformation. Many people argue that it's a free speech issue, when it is not the case since it is not the federal government handling the issue. But one of the more pressing reasons why deplatforming spreaders of misinformation, especially in the case of Donald Trump, is if actually helps curb the spread. While misinformation probably cannot be stamped out of social media, let alone the internet, completely, there is enough reason to believe that deplatforming works. Deplatforming may not be a perfect solution to curbing the spread. One account can get stamped out, and another one can take its place. Social media platforms may as well try to step on every bug on the planet until there is no more. But when it comes to Donald Trump, a president who went out his way to give a voice to the spreaders of misinformation, allowed them to become more openly vocal about their agendas. Following his loss to Joe Biden in the 2020 Presidential Election, Trump constantly falsely claimed the election was stolen, and that Democrats handicapped his abilities to curb the coronavirus to make him look like a bad president. After the capital riots earlier in January, encouraged by President Trump, social media platforms banned Trump from their accounts first for a certain period, then permanently. Everyone wondered if banning the person that was amplifying the spreaders of misinformation would instead encourage them to voice their opinions louder that social media is turning into a Stalinist regime. Instead, banning Trump resulted in a decline in misinformation. Elizabeth Dwoskin and Craig Timberg reported in The Washington Post that Zignal Labs, which conducted research on misinformation on social media after Twitter and Facebook banned Trump, found that conversations about election fraud dropped from 2.5 million mentions to 688,000 mentions. Part of this is due to social media taking a more active role in banning accounts that encouraged election fraud beyond President Trump. Another aspect of this is Trump supporters deciding to leave a site since they felt social media sites made it clear their ideologies were not welcome, and left the site out of protest. While social media sites banned Trump mainly because they were pressed to, especially since Trump prided emphasizing his ego on the social media platforms, is not a perfect way to squash Q-Anon ideology from the sites, it is the most effective way to curb its spread. The accounts were physically calling for violence to install Trump as the supreme leader of the United States. Even if Trump managed to win the election, who knows what kind of damage he and Q-Anon could have started once his second term came to an end, especially after eight years of Trump's presidency and rhetoric. If social media platforms want to maintain that their presence on the internet helps the world connect in a meaningful way, then it needs to take responsibility for what individuals post on the site. CITATIONS: Dwoskin, Elizabeth Craig Timberg. “Misinformation Dropped Dramatically the Week after Twitter Banned Trump and Some Allies.” Washington Post, 16 Jan. 2021, www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/01/16/misinformation-trump-twitter.

Deplatforming is akin to trying to ban an idea… yeah good luck with that. No one benefits from deplatforming, the speech that is banned/ frowned upon simply flourishes in the depth of an Internet forum somewhere in the depths and resentment continues to build amongst this group who feel that their voices have been taken away. Even if an individual completely disagrees with a given rhetoric, it is much better to have the enemy in the open where they are a known entity. Given the above deplatforming does not benefit either party therefore no, it does not/is very unlikely to work.

I can still find fashwave videos that have been taken down 100+ times and their creators banned on every major platform. The internet cannot be controlled. Period . End of story. Cope and seethe. This is too short so as filler most of the content creator I follow are banned on at least one platform and usually multiple and they're now bigger than ever

It doesn't work at all, you can deplatform somebody from a few platforms but there will always be another platform no matter what you do. It doesn't stop them and just makes them way more radical than before. If you truly want to get somebody quote on quote "deplatformed" then you would need to actually convince people not to support them because if there is a platform that they can escape to (which there always is), their supporters are going to support them there. Not to mention alt-accounts. Nothing stops them from just making a new account, even if there is an IP ban or a browser ban, they can just use a VPN and reset cookies, they never really go away, like a mosquito that keeps coming back, deplatforming is basically the hand swatting of the mosquito, it just comes back again. Not to mention deplatforming isn't a good thing anyway, if somebody did something truly horrible enough they would be in jail, alternatively if it's something that they said that offends you well then tough-luck, in the real world you will have disagreements and you won't be able to just report them in real life because they "hurt your feelings".