> How is immunodeficiency treatment at all related to deplatforming? Viruses aren't thinking human beings.
> The Civil Rights movement did not enagage in deplatforming. Many of them explicitly acknowledged that their opponents also deserve the ability to speak. It was often the civil Rights movement itself that was subject to deplatforming.
My point is that the type of reasoning you used here would lead you to draw both of those conclusions.
> The rise of deplatforming preceded the rise of the Alt Right by about a year or two. They didn't always co-occur, one preceded the other. Their continued co-occurrence suggests that the implementation of deplatforming either 1. has no effect on that brand of extremist, or 2. maybe even causes it.
That's an a-factual statement. When did the alt right "rise"? Was it when Mencius Moldbug started writing Unqualified Reservations in 2007? When Richard Spencer joined the National Policy Institute in 2011? During Gamergate in 2014? Similarly, when did de-platforming 'start'? Was it when people first started protesting The Bell Curve when it was published in 1994? Was it when British National Union of Students adopted a no-platform policy?
The point is, neither of these events have a well-defined starting point, so any claim of one preceding the other is silly, and has no basis in fact.
> Limiting measurement to individual communities is not a good way to measur it's overall effect. Again pointing out the fact that when a community deplatforms a certain view that view is no longer present is pointing out an obvious consequence. Of course the platform sees a reduction in the view that was deplatformed. That's basically just restating the definition of deplatforming: kicking a person or group off the platform.
Your objection suggests a specific causal model, though. You're right that kicking users off of the platform will tautologically reduce the content. However, what if you didn't kick people off the platform? What if instead, as in the example I linked, you banned the sub-communities dedicated to advocacy of the proscribed topics? The people stay, the community goes. Then, you look at the level of the material in other sub-communities on the site. That is what those studies did, and that is why they demonstrate causality.