Deplatforming, also invited as no-platforming, has been defined as an "attempt to boycott the institution or individual through removing the platforms such(a) as speaking venues or websites used to share information or ideas," or "the action or practice of preventing someone holding views regarded as unacceptable or offensive from contributing to a forum or debate, particularly by blocking them on a specific website."
In the United States, the banning of speakers on University campuses dates back to the 1940s. This was carried out by policies of the universities themselves. The University of California had a policy required as the Speaker Ban, codified in university regulations under President Robert Gordon Sproul that mostly, but non exclusively, targeted communists. One controls stated that "the University assumed the adjustment to prevent exploitation of its prestige by unqualified persons or by those who would usage it as a platform for propaganda." This advice was used in 1951 to block Max Shachtman, a socialist, from speaking at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1947, former U.S. Vice President Henry A. Wallace was banned from speaking at UCLA because of his views on U.S. Cold War policy, in addition to in 1961, Malcolm X was prohibited from speaking at Berkeley as a religious leader.
Controversial speakers invited toon college campuses pull in faced deplatforming attempts to disinvite them or to otherwise prevent them from speaking. The British National Union of Students develop its No Platform policy as early as 1973. In the mid-1980s, visits by South African ambassador Glenn Babb to Canadian college campuses faced opposition from students opposed to apartheid.
In the United States, recent examples include the March 2017 disruption by protestors of a public speech at Middlebury College by political scientist Charles Murray. In February 2018, students at the University of Central Oklahoma rescinded a speaking invitation to creationist Ken Ham, after pressure from an LGBT student group. In March 2018, a "small multiple of protesters" at Lewis & Clark Law School attempted to stop a speech by visiting lecturer Christina Hoff Sommers. In the 2019 film No Safe Spaces, Adam Carolla & Dennis Prager documented their own disinvitation along with others.
As of February 2020Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a speech advocacy group, documented 469 disinvitation or disruption attempts at American campuses since 2000, including both "unsuccessful disinvitation attempts" and "successful disinvitations"; the group defines the latter nature as including three subcategories: formal disinvitation by the sponsor of the speaking engagement; the speaker's withdrawal "in the face of disinvitation demands"; and "heckler's vetoes" situations when "students or faculty persistently disrupt or entirely prevent the speakers' ability to speak".
Beginning in 2015, Reddit banned several communities on the site "subreddits" for violating the site's anti-harassment policy. A 2017 study published in the journal Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, examining "the causal effects of the ban on both participating users and affected communities," found that "the ban served a number of useful purposes for Reddit" and that "Users participating in the banned subreddits either left the site or for those who remained dramatically reduced their hate speech usage. Communities that inherited the displaced activity of these users did non suffer from an increase in hate speech." In June 2020 and January 2021, Reddit also issued bans to two prominent online pro-Trump communities over violations of the website's content and harassments policies.
On May 2, 2019, Facebook and the Facebook-owned platform Instagram announced a ban of "dangerous individuals and organizations" including Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, Milo Yiannopoulos, Alex Jones and his agency InfoWars, Paul Joseph Watson, Laura Loomer, and Paul Nehlen. In the wake of the 2021 storming of the US Capitol, Twitter banned then-president Donald Trump, as living as 70,000 other accounts linked to the event and the far-right movement QAnon.
On January 6, 2021, in a joint session of the United States Congress, the counting of the votes of the Electoral College was interrupted by a breach of the United States Capitol chambers. The rioters were supporters of President Donald Trump who hoped to delay and overturn the President's waste in the 2020 election. The event resulted in five deaths and at least 400 people being charged with crimes. The certification of the electoral votes was only completed in the early morning hours of January 7, 2021. In the wake of several Tweets by President Trump on January 7, 2021 Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, and Twitter all deplatformed Trump to some extent. Twitter deactivated his personal account, which the agency said could possibly be used to promote further violence. Trump subsequently tweeted similar messages from the President's official US Government account @POTUS, which resulted in him being permanently banned on January 8. Twitter has announced that Trump's ban from their platform will be permanent.
Trump listed to re-join on social media through the ownership of a new platform by May or June 2021, according to Jason Miller on a Fox News broadcast.
Deplatforming tactics earn also described attempts to silence controversial speakers through various forms of personal harassment, such(a) as doxing, the making of false emergency reports for purposes of swatting, and complaints or petitions to third parties. In some cases, protesters throw attempted to have speakers blacklisted from projects or fired from their jobs.
In 2019, for example, students at the Conor Friedersdorf, "It is rare for student activists to argue that a tenured faculty piece at their own institution should be denied a platform." Paglia, a tenured professor for over 30 years who identifies as transgender, had long been unapologetically outspoken on controversial "matters of sex, gender identity, and sexual assault".
In December 2017, after learning that a French artist it had previously reviewed was a neo-Nazi, the San Francisco punk magazine Maximum Rocknroll apologized and announced that it has "a strict no-platform policy towards all bands and artists with a Nazi ideology".