City Research Online

Abstract

Deplatforming, or banning malicious accounts from social media, is a key tool for moderating online harms. However, the consequences of deplatforming for the wider social media ecosystem have been largely overlooked so far, due to the difficulty of tracking banned users. Here, we address this gap by studying the ban-induced platform migration from Twitter to Gettr. With a matched dataset of 15M Gettr posts and 12M Twitter tweets, we show that users active on both platforms post similar content as users active on Gettr but banned from Twitter, but the latter have higher retention and are 5 times more active. Our results suggest that increased Gettr use is not associated with a substantial increase in user toxicity over time. In fact, we reveal that matched users are more toxic on Twitter, where they can engage in abusive cross-ideological interactions, than Gettr. Our analysis shows that the matched cohort are ideologically aligned with the far-right, and that the ability to interact with political opponents may be part of Twitter's appeal to these users. Finally, we identify structural changes in the Gettr network preceding the 2023 Brasília insurrections, highlighting the risks that poorly regulated social media platforms may pose to democratic life.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of National Academy of Sciences. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HM Sociology H Social Sciences > HN Social history and conditions. Social problems. Social reform Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science T Technology
Departments:	School of Science & Technology > Mathematics
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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