What’s important is the overall trend, the increasing involvement of government officials in deplatforming attempts, and the fact that such attempts are now bipartisan. This dovetails with recent polls showing increased support for using violence against speech by political opponents, across the spectrum.
I don’t have the data, but my own experience is that the left wasn’t using deplatforming much from Bush to Obama I, and the right wasn’t using it much from Obama II to Biden. Although that could just reflect who held institutional/cultural power at the time. So it could be cyclical.
When Biden asked Twitter to stop spreading the Good News about horse paste during the pandemic, it broke conservatives' brains somehow. I mean, they are furious about that. A lot of what has happened since then can be traced to their efforts to redress this perceived injustice.
Even worse, it's "deplatforming attempts". If someone complains about a speaker, even if the institution doesn't agree, it seemingly goes on the list. In that context it feels even more ridiculous.
I believe it is also per-speaker-at-event, not simply per-event. So if there is a panel of ten people, that counts as ten deplatformings.
So something like this from their recent list:
> Turning Point USA scheduled a “Freedom Built to Last: Honoring Charlie Kirk” memorial at Utah Valley University, featuring a number of prominent conservative speakers. Students for a Democratic Society at UVU opposed the event honoring Kirk and his political legacy. The university declined to cancel the event, and it proceeded on Sept. 10.
Oh good catch. Ok, so nationally, if each campus held only one event per week, we're saying 0.07% of all meetings had someone speak up against it. Less than a tenth of one percent.
I couldn't roll my eyes any harder. This certainly is a national crisis.
Yeah, it appears that several recent incidents that they highlight proceeded anyway. I would expect students to protest a Turning Point event at a university; that doesn't make it "deplatforming," especially if the university allows the event to proceed as planned.
Would you expect government officials to join deplatforming attempts, using their position to demand that universities listen? Because increasingly that’s happening as well, as reported in the second half of the article.
Government officials applying pressure on cultural outlets is nothing new, but it’s been a long time since we’ve had them leaning on universities to reject certain on-campus speakers.
I'm very much for free speech but FIRE here is cataloging "attempts to oppose invited guest speeches" at a time where actual students have been expelled or sent to guantanamo for political speech. Have some perspective.
I take this as a stronger signal that too many people with shitty opinions have a microphone these days, and they make it their entire career to "tour" and manufacture outrage. We're really complaining that students objected to Tim Pool speaking on their campus? Freedom from association can be as strong of an argument as freedom of expression. Negative / positive rights and all that. Hopefully we're hitting peak podcast / ragebait culture and Gen Alpha will call out their elder Gen Z cohort as "cringe" for listening to so many low-signal podcasts.
I cannot be bothered to care about this kind of thing. A student group submitted a proposal that an event be canceled but the proposal didn't succeed? That sounds like something that happens a normal democratic society. How is that newsworthy in a world where we have actual students being expelled for partaking in protests or e.g. arrested for an op-ed in the student paper.
It’s a trend that reveals attitudes about hearing opposing perspectives in younger cohorts. It’s an early signal for what future politics may look like.
> Almost all of the deplatforming attempts involving politicians or government appointees since 2023 have come from the right of the expression.
First comment:
> Democrats are Fascists, they hate free speech, hate private property and individual rights, support massive wealth redistribution, and they always have.
If the comments here are anything to go by, everyone now assumes that “deplatforming” automatically means “left wing activists versus right wing provocateur” and tunes out without reading.
Academic campuses are just a specific battleground for this sort of thing with a highly motivatable group of people with sufficient time. To be honest, campus speakers are rarely of value. Most content is better transmitted through text than through speech. The latter has substantially more density per unit time and allows for per-reader sophistication with modern interrogation tools.
The reason for campus speakers falling out of favour so that only unthreatening ones are accepted is perhaps troubling but the outcome isn’t so bad. The utility of a college is primarily certification because pedagogy for a motivated learner is superior with an LLM. So few who desire to learn will be impeded by this process and few who wish to be certified will either.
This society being a democratic republic, there is quite some risk in the sort of purity seeking combined with a weakness against external nations becoming the cultural norm, but so be it. The tribe of Mankind is an evolving creature and if the democratic republic faction burns itself and the autocracy does not then that’s as much natural selection as melanin adaptation in Africa.
200 deplatforms in a year? (There were 75 in 2003, the 30 year trend is gentle at best.)
There's almost 6000 higher education institutions in the US. This is fabricated outrage.
They were always bipartisan.
McCarthy. The Dixie Chicks. Teletubbies. Hell, the American Revolution saw people tarred and feathered for supporting the wrong side.
Humans have done this as long as there've been humans. Other ape species exclude shits from the troop just like we do.
So something like this from their recent list:
> Turning Point USA scheduled a “Freedom Built to Last: Honoring Charlie Kirk” memorial at Utah Valley University, featuring a number of prominent conservative speakers. Students for a Democratic Society at UVU opposed the event honoring Kirk and his political legacy. The university declined to cancel the event, and it proceeded on Sept. 10.
I couldn't roll my eyes any harder. This certainly is a national crisis.
Math: 200/(50*6000)
Absolutely. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Bad_Neighbors
Also, maybe you didn’t read closely, but an increasing number of deplatforming attempts are coming from the right, which may be important for you.
> Almost all of the deplatforming attempts involving politicians or government appointees since 2023 have come from the right of the expression.
First comment:
> Democrats are Fascists, they hate free speech, hate private property and individual rights, support massive wealth redistribution, and they always have.
Sigh.
The reason for campus speakers falling out of favour so that only unthreatening ones are accepted is perhaps troubling but the outcome isn’t so bad. The utility of a college is primarily certification because pedagogy for a motivated learner is superior with an LLM. So few who desire to learn will be impeded by this process and few who wish to be certified will either.
This society being a democratic republic, there is quite some risk in the sort of purity seeking combined with a weakness against external nations becoming the cultural norm, but so be it. The tribe of Mankind is an evolving creature and if the democratic republic faction burns itself and the autocracy does not then that’s as much natural selection as melanin adaptation in Africa.