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Based on the evolution of the web, indeed, it looks like new businesses will be made out of this.

With this banned group, I am concerned about what social scientists call the 'backfire effect', where beliefs turn even stronger and bolder. For instance, this happens with groups of people who hold conspiracy theories; when society rejects them, the conspiracy theorists double-down on their beliefs.

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The key thing you're missing is recruitment. White supremacists need access to the larger platforms in order to recruit new adherents to their bigoted ideology, which is significantly harder to do if they're forced into "underground" spaces. De-platforming works -- if we make it clear that hateful ideology isn't tolerated in large platforms, then people have to actively seek out such ideologies. If such ideologies are already frowned upon in the public sphere, it makes their recruitment much more difficult.

They existed long before the internet and will exist even if they’re banned from it. When it comes to racism, a lot is spread through family and friends. Get to know certain people long enough and they’ll do the old ‘look both ways and say “they don’t want you to know this, but the truth about (x group of people) is...”’ routine.

Ban what these clowns say on the internet and it might end up giving them more power, since it lends to the “they don’t want you to know” aspect.

All true, but it's a fact that they recruit through the internet and have had a digital organizing strategy since the 1980s. The armored car robberies mentioned herein were used to finance a nationwide chain of bulletin boards known as Aryan Nations Liberty Net.

Recruitment matters because groups that don't recruit successfully eventually lose momentum, are penetrated by spies, or dissolve into infighting over everything from leadership status to money to women. In fact, the biggest mortality risk for RW extremists seems to come from their own peer group, though I don't have stats for this offhand.

Certainly those attitudes and ideologies will continue to exist in the face of deplatforming, but raising the costs of recruitment, retention, and operation seems to be an effective strategy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Order_(white_supremacist_g...

https://www.adl.org/sites/default/files/documents/assets/pdf...

Totally agree, recruitment will be much more difficult. It's what happens to many conspiracy theorists over time. Their recruitment takes the hit in society.

The purveyors of such ideologies simply do a wink-wink-nudge-nudge dance.

Look at Germany and its Streitbare Demokratie policies. Then look at how AfD polls.

Right – but then consider what its popularity might be today if AfD-aligned content had been banned by Facebook and other platforms from the start. Parties like the NPD have been around for ages, but unlike the AfD they were kept out of the Overton window and never managed to grow to significant numbers.

And how exactly would you define it to ban it? Germany already has some of the most extensive hate speech / anti-extremism laws in Europe. I mean, it's not just censorship, but e.g. outright bans on parties expressing certain views in their platform, or even just insufficiently democratic internally, and with various specialized institutions that enforce all that proactively. And all that wasn't enough to prevent AfD from operating legally.

Facebook can just ban them by name without any explanation, of course. Are you suggesting that it's a good thing - that, because we seemingly can't write fair laws on this, we should delegate both the laws and their enforcement to private industry, where it can be done without any checks and balances?

I think you're right. Every time you censor something you create market pressures for a way to host content that's more difficult to be taken down or traced back to a source.

It's why I think censorship is self defeating, it will eventually lead to a populace being competent enough with certain tools to side step the censor, and you can't walk that back.

Good luck to them